Guy Hoelzer  wrote in
news:bame6e$1j1r$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> in article ba8hg6$49n$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org, phillip smith at
> phills{at}ihug.co.nz wrote on 5/18/03 10:56 AM:

My comments are actually mostly directed to Phillip's post.

 
>> It depends on your definition of metabolism if you take a broad view
>> like I found in http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolism
>> That metabolism is equivalent to life and so of course you can not
>> evolve a life that doesn't have life.
 
> This is consistent with my view.
 
>> You can have life with out evolution by the definition used here  as
>> fire can be considered to be alive.
> 
> It did suggest that fire has metabolism, and I can see how you could
> argue that a fire did not evolve.  Personally, I don't like the fire
> example because it is merely a burning process.  In my way of
> thinking, metabolism is more complex than that.  Energy must be burned
> in a process that generates functional integration of a system in my
> dictionary. 
> 
>> Since it breaks down chemical energy to release
>> heat and waste
>>


Remember that fire as we know it is essentially a parasitic process that 
is dependent on life to create the materials it needs to survive. So even 
if we want to consider fire as "alive" and as exhibiting
"metabolism", it  
still could not exist without evolution. 


 
>> But if are just talking about he metabolic pathway found in all
>> eukaryotes then the only thing we can be sure of is that it is does
>> not represent a global optimum but perhaps a local optimum. This is
>> purely because the solution space is so large. It is impossible to
>> explore even a reasonable fraction of it. But once a local optima is
>> found the search effectively ends.


If you haven't already, you might like to read Dennett's "Darwin's 
Dangerous Idea". He has a nice chapter on comparing the solution space 
for evolution with Borges' conception of the Library of Babel. 

Yours,

Bill Morse
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