University of Groningen
Steps towards de-novo life
Monreal Santiago, Guillermo
DOI:
10.33612/diss.121581426
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Publication date: 2020
Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database
Citation for published version (APA):
Monreal Santiago, G. (2020). Steps towards de-novo life: compartmentalization and feedback mechanisms in synthetic self-replicating systems. University of Groningen. https://doi.org/10.33612/diss.121581426
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Stellingen
Behorende bij het proefschrift
"Steps towards de-novo life. Compartmentalization and feedback mechanisms of synthetic self-replicating systems."
van Guillermo Monreal Santiago
1. Science, by definition, can only provide negative proofs. Scientific truths are never absolute and paradigms should always be challenged: for centuries, phlogiston and aether were the standard for scientists just as smart and rigorous as the ones living today.
2. Fundamental concepts are more useful in chemistry research than spe-cific knowledge about the latest techniques. Special care should be taken when teaching undergraduate courses so the former are not dis-missed to make room for the latter.
3. The internet has already made a number of concepts and institutions obsolete (e.g. movie rentals, physical encyclopedias, personal mail). Others, such as the current system of scientific publication, are living on borrowed time.
4. The main goal of universities should be to preserve knowledge and transmit it to the next generation, not to produce revenue or even to do research.
5. There are only two scenarios for the synthesis of fully artificial life: ei-ther it is possible and ei-there is no categorical difference between life and no-life, or it is not possible and life has something unique that cannot be reproduced. Both scenarios are equally fascinating and terrifying. 6. The fear that the automatization of labour will cause a disappearance
of jobs and a collapse of the economy is an argument against capital-ism, not against technology.
7. Inheriting money or properties is intrinsically unfair and only causes inequality.
8. The exploitation of animals for food and other products is barbaric, irresponsible, and completely unnecessary (at least, for most people reading this thesis). The degree to which it is accepted is a testimony to how anything can be normalized by society and tradition.
9. Universities should have permanent positions between professors and technicians: otherwise good researchers are pushed out of academia for not being competitive enough, and big groups suffer from loss of knowledge and delays since the professor has to handle too many re-sponsibilities.
10. The different theories about the origin of life (compartments / repli-cation / metabolism - first) seem to be in a constant conflict, as if only one of them will be right and the others will be wrong. Even if it was remotely possible to discover which one applies to the origin of cur-rently known, terrestrial life, the other theories might still be relevant for life in other planets, or other possible forms of life.
11. Systems properties should be classified as "emergent" based on whether they can be reduced to the individual components of the system, not on whether they can be predicted from them [1]. A property of a system does not depend on the knowledge of its observer.
12. The choice between different pathways in education should be post-poned as much as possible: Interdisciplinarity begins at an individual level.
13. Definitions are necessary to understand the world around us, but some-times it is simply impossible for them to be rigorous. If there is no such thing as a fish [2], why should there be such a thing as life?
[1] The Oxford companion to philosophy; Oxford University Press, 2005. [2] Beswick, S. The decline of the fish/mammal distinction? U. Pa. L. Rev.
