Its much harder to produce a good fundamental list of biology problems because we are no where near as far along, so many basic things are not understood. There are still many unknown unknowns and these particular problems are limited to the realm of verifiable in a lab, which rules out much of what makes biology interesting and hard to study, and that is the organisms themselves and the interactions between their cells. The petri dish differs from the rat differs from the human and that is a part of what makes biology harder to progress.

None of these is likely the root to the wide array of chronic illnesses we can't treat and those seem like the next step to really put a lot of research into given how many people suffer from them and where we are today they seem achievable with the right investment.

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shevy-java 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> The petri dish differs from the rat differs from the human and that is a part of what makes biology harder to progress.

They all use DNA.

But I agree that nobody has shown in the lab how any of this leads to a genetic system that can self-reproduce reliably and assemble biomolecules/metabolites. This is a missing link. Just showing how RNA or amino acids arise, says nothing about any genetic system. They can not even answer whether RNA or DNA viruses existed first; and whether these existed before organisms/cells did.

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HarHarVeryFunny 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The goal of the suggested "origins of life" problem, as written, isn't to guess at history - it's to create some similar plausible self-emergent system in the lab.

Seems a bit of an ambitious goal for a language model though! There are presumably dozens of steps before you get to an RNA-based full-blown cell, and it's only been very recently that humans have managed to make an artificial self-replicating "cell" (container) of any type in the lab.

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pixl97 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>They all use DNA.

I really really recommend looking up Michael Levins bio work on intelligence at the cellular and organ level.

His most recent work is starting to touch on some pretty far out concepts. And I should note, that he does not state they are true or not, but they are attempting to make empirical methods on testing them.

One of the concepts they are looking at is "math as an actual thing" and that some simple algorithms have new deeper behaviors that we're just finding now. The hypothesis is that over the eons life has probed mathematics at scales humanity cannot even begin to imagine and is exploiting this deep algorithmic efficiency in accomplishing any number of tasks. These algorithms could help explain the missing links.

I'd suggest starting with some of his older work to see they are a credentialed research scientist and not making up 'woo' whole cloth.

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bglazer 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m curious how you found Michael’s work? Like what led you to familiarize yourself with his research?

He seems to be essentially the only biologist that hackernews knows and he always (always!) comes up in biology discussion. I’m wondering how this particular situation arose.

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pixl97 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's been long enough that I'm not really sure. It's every time I see some of his work the way he looks at problems always intrigued me.

Dogma in science tends to blind people, and when a field starts slowing down and running into things we cannot address then we have to start looking at what we should be questioning.

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bglazer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

How do you keep up to date with his work?

	▲	pixl97 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just searching it up in YouTube is a good starting place. He has visited a number of different podcasts. Then from there you can drill down into papers on the interesting things.