'Artificial life' creation True or showmanship???

Thanks for the referral Ms.Bindu Narayan.But is it possible to create artificially all the living thing in the world that God/Nature has created.

Well we should appreciate the efforts, experiments, research and developments in creating the artificial life in rare cases. In front of God's/Nature's creation no one can stand.   

The modeling philosophy of artificial life strongly differs from traditional modeling, by studying not only “life-as-we-know-it”, but also “life-as-it-might-be”.

In the first approach, a traditional model of a biological system will focus on capturing its most important parameters. In contrast, an artyificial life modeling approach will generally seek to decipher the most simple and general principles underlying life and implement them in a simulation. The simulation then offers the possibility to analyse new, different life-like systems.

To generalize this distinction to not just to the modeling of life, but to any process. This led to the more general distinction of "processes-as-we-know-them" and "processes-as-they-could-be"

At present, the commonly accepted definition of life does not consider any current artificial life simulations to be alive, and they do not constitute part of the evolutionary process of any ecosystem. However, different opinions about artificial life's potential have arisen:

    * The strong artificial life position states that "life is a process which can be abstracted away from any particular medium".

    * The weak artificial life position denies the possibility of generating a "living process" outside of a chemical solution. Its researchers try instead to simulate life processes to understand the underlying mechanics of biological phenomena.

First of all people should keep their super-natural beliefs and super gods and religious inclinations and godly hallucinations at bay while discussing such issues. To those who say that man can never create an "artificial life" as good as the natural one, let me remind them that it is just a beginning. How much time has passed since man started thinking about this stuff - especially of synthesising life in laboratories ? Not even a century I guess or may be a little more than century. It is just the first step towards a future where Man will be able to create "life forms" as good as natural ones.People then can literally mean the phrase " Get a life".

Being an IP Consultant, I find this as an inventive step and non-obvious thing of course people around the globe might have given thought to this idea but Mr. Craig actually DID it and that is what matters !! He swapped whole of genome and gave a new life form. The methods, protocols therefore are inventive. Therefore it is true and not showmanship.

And the way debate starter sound it look as simple replacing as replacing programmes of computer let me remind him that this is where biology differs. New programmes will still work by doing few obvious things like adding more memory, or changing operating system if it is open source which won't come under inventive step of course but but but if the programme new programme was so designed to work on that computer and its specifications or even change the environment of that computer so that it can work differently then it might be inventive. 

So the argument put forth by you  has a fallacy because you have not mentioned if the programme was new or not or it was just  replacement of existing programme with another programme. Also while replacing programme computer would not die ... while replacing "genome" a biological system is certainly at danger of death... !Mr venter remarked "It’s like changing a Macintosh computer into a PC by inserting a new piece of software"  Therefore that "software" might be inventive. You are changing whole of OS !! come on .. the idea is obvious to make Mac work like PC but putting idea into practice and coming up with it is of course inventive !Plus in Biotechnology and biological fields we not only need just a new "software" and even if software is old and existing then too we need "method" of putting that "software" successfully into new biological environment and here he has SWAPPED genome ! Therefore the "method" of replacing genome must be inventive and not that obvious as Mr. Bhrigu made it sound ! If it is obvious I will ask him to perform genome swapping experiments in his lab ! 

But still computers shall not be compared with biological systems... the explanation Mr. Venter gave is just for "common man" and "noobs" so that they understand what he has achieved... Infact debate starter is here comparing apple with oranges. 

Also the debate starter must understand difference between creating a new "life" and creating a new "life-form" ! Like plant breeding does not give rise to new life but to new life forms or plant varieties !!