human is biochemical machine .... explain in brief
Answers
Answer:
The wording of this question as well as many of the answers show the persistence of our primitive belief that humans are fundamentally special, just like it was believed that the earth was special, the center of the Universe.
But over the last few centuries we (mostly the religiously dogmatic people) were dismayed to learn that in fact the earth not only revolved around the sun, but it was just the third rocky planet among a total of 8 planets and numerous asteroids, dwarf planets and comets that also orbited the sun; even worse, there was nothing special about our sun either, it is just an average sized star somewhere out towards one edge of a typical spiral galaxy that contains billions of stars big and small, and that telescopes further revealed there are billions of galaxies of various shapes in a mind-bogglingly large and sparse Universe.
OK we swallowed that pill, but, but… we humans are still special, because we can write poetry and solve geometry, can any chimp do that?
No, but man-made computers are certainly beginning to threaten to do so.
The discovery of DNA and the genetic code less than a century ago, like the discovery of the heliocentric model, firmly connected humans with not only all mammals, not only all animals, but in fact all life forms in a tree of life that is based in DNA-controlled biological cells.
Last universal common ancestor - Wikipedia
Each biological cell, whether a human cell, a mouse cell, a mango cell, or the single cell of a bacterium (like E-Coli) turns out to be not just a machine, but an intelligent machine, a veritable factory of machines being run by the genetic code (written in the quaternary language of GATACCA…) in its DNA that provides the detail instructions on how the cell must grow and replicate through cell division. That genetic code is analogous to the operating system of a computer, as it controls every function of a cell, except it seems to have only one purpose - to preserve that genetic code through replication.
It is a long, very long journey of evolution from simple cells to multi-cellular eukaryotic organisms like plants and animals that took several billion years, and we humans along with our other primate cousins are among the most complex and most intelligent machines.
If we just put aside poetry and geometry for a moment (which frankly not many of us humans really do much of), we humans are really not altogether all that different from other animals in that our brains (even that of a fruit fly) together with the various sensors (like eyes, ears, nose etc) intelligently interacts with the environment to seek and recognize threats, food and mates.
It really boils down to those 3 primary tasks:
1. sense threats to ones survival and make an intelligent response that is usually freeze, flight or fight;
2. detect food for nourishment (energy) and growth; and,
3. detect mates for sexual reproduction.
You may argue that man, and man alone, among all the primates and other intelligent species including dolphins and magpies, went beyond those 3 tasks, to introspect, to wonder why we are here, what is the purpose of life, what else is out there beyond our foraging area, even beyond the earth, and this is undeniably true.
Still there is no reason to suspect that that is not just a natural outcome of reaching the top of the food chain, where the human brain found itself with ample idle time and processing power to turn its data analysis, from mostly that of sensory inputs, to that of accumulated knowledge.
Where humans are truly special among mammals, even among its smartest primate cousins, is in our ability to conceive of 2 very powerful abstract concepts: god and money, both of which are unique in its ability to rally enormous numbers of people to coherently work towards a common cause.
But, certain insects like ants and bees also are known to do this (build complex structures employing very large number of individuals working coherently) without inventing either concept.
Yet they lacked one other invention of humans, the most powerful one: to write and record new learning and thus accumulate knowledge over generations, which made humans, collectively, vastly more powerful, by orders of magnitude, than even an army of individuals.
Today the Internet contains all our knowledge and while we believe we humans still control it, and can unplug it at will, it is unclear if that will remain so.
Answer:
The wording of this question as well as many of the answers show the persistence of our primitive belief that humans are fundamentally special, just like it was believed that the earth was special, the center of the Universe.
But over the last few centuries we (mostly the religiously dogmatic people) were dismayed to learn that in fact the earth not only revolved around the sun, but it was just the third rocky planet among a total of 8 planets and numerous asteroids, dwarf planets and comets that also orbited the sun; even worse, there was nothing special about our sun either, it is just an average sized star somewhere out towards one edge of a typical spiral galaxy that contains billions of stars big and small, and that telescopes further revealed there are billions of galaxies of various shapes in a mind-bogglingly large and sparse Universe.
Explanation: