114: Life

Loading...

Sign in or sign up now!
Alert icon
Upgrade to the latest Flash Player for improved playback performance. Upgrade now or more info.
170 views
Loading...
Alert icon
Sign in or sign up now!
Alert icon

Uploaded by on Jul 10, 2009

My answer to Javier's question of the week. If I sound unenthusiastic, it's because I just woke up.

  • likes, 0 dislikes

Link to this comment:

Share to:

Uploader Comments (5madheathens)

  • your videos are getting better and better.

    DNA is right, but I just wonder where life begins. Its good to say life starts from cells, but how do we get to cells. How do enzymes know they have to link to DNA and start transcription, so how does everything smaller than a cell has movement and in a way some form of life? The start of everything is very hard to address. Just like the big bang theory.

    Sofia

see all

All Comments (6)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!
  • At 3:44 you said that life in general is here for absolutely no purpose. But purpose is given by another subject. A great example would be : A chair has a purpose, given by an intelligent being : a human. So we can see that there are 2 subjects : The chair, and the second one is the human, which gives the chair, purpose. When we are talking about the purpose of life, people tend to attribute it to an intelligent being such as a god. But really there is no second subject to give meaning to life.

  • Ah. That's miles beyond my high school level knowledge of biology.

  • You are right about DNA. It requires many proteins to replicate, these consist of structural proteins and enzymes. Enzymes that unzip it, replicate both strands (differently) and then zip it up. It also requires a specific environment to be replicated in.

  • Reading

    What is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger (1944)

    What is Life? by Ed Regis (2008)

  • Ah. Thank you.

  • yeah. DNA is IN cells. It's not alive on its own. You're right. RNA is not an 'older' version of DNA, though. RNA is how DNA's data is transcribed in our cells to guide the manufacture of proteins from basic amino acids. But the size of a cell isn't arbitrary, though... it was chosen by natural selection by which larger, slower variations failed, and smaller, more constrained (less versatile) variations failed as well. Don't worry, it's just statistics ^_^

Loading...
Alert icon
0 / 00Unsaved Playlist Return to active list
    1. Your queue is empty. Add videos to your queue using this button:
      or sign in to load a different list.
    Loading...Loading...Saving...
    • Clear all videos from this list
    • Learn more