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    321,452
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    42
    The compositional account explains how collections of liv... — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    The compositional account explains how collections of live individuals may evolve.

    Afterlife & Death
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Individual objects are alive only if their composition is under the control of some of their parts (e.g., nucleic acid molecules) that carry information.
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    • 2.The mechanisms by which such information is carried tend to be modified over time, altering the information they carry, and thus the features of the organisms they help shape, introducing mutations that may or may not facilitate survival.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.The compositional account conflates the conditions for life with the conditions for evolutionary change, which are logically distinct phenomena.
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    • 2.Ernst Mayr's biological species concept demonstrates that evolution operates on populations via reproductive isolation, not merely informational composition of parts.
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    • 3.A collection of live individuals can evolve through genetic drift or environmental selection without any change in the informational mechanisms of their constituent parts.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Margolis and Sagan's symbiogenesis theory shows that major evolutionary transitions arise from mergers of organisms, not internal informational modification of parts.
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    • 2.If evolutionary change can originate from wholesale compositional reorganization rather than mutation of existing informational carriers, the account's explanatory scope is radically incomplete.
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    Topics

    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    A collection of live individuals can evolve through genetic drift or environment...Ernst Mayr's biological species concept demonstrates that evolution operates on ...If evolutionary change can originate from wholesale compositional reorganization...Individual objects are alive only if their composition is under the control of s...
    +3 moreShow less
    Margolis and Sagan's symbiogenesis theory shows that major evolutionary transiti...The compositional account conflates the conditions for life with the conditions ...The mechanisms by which such information is carried tend to be modified over tim...

    Similar

    The compositional account implies that being alive is a property an in...75%The ability to evolve by natural selection is a feature that collectio...71%Yet individual organisms may be alive.68%Being alive is a property an individual may bear on its own, without b...68%

    Source

    AI-extracted3/3 agreementValid
    SEP: death
    View source passageHide passage
    This account of life needs refinement, but it avoids at least most of the worries mentioned earlier. It implies that an object may be alive even though it is sterile (as in the case of mules), even though it survives on stored energy (as in the case of a silk moth), and conceivably even if it lacks nucleic acid (yet is still composed of things that engage in activities integrated in conformity with information they carry). In fact, it implies that being capable of none of the items on Aristotle’s list is necessary nor sufficient for being alive. What is more, the compositional account just ske...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The passage explicitly presents these two premises in sequence to explain how the compositional account accounts for evolution in collections of living individuals, directly supporting the stated conclusion.

    Confidence: Clearly articulated explanatory argument.

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit