Bio week 5

Like we talked about in class, the best was to distinguish a living system from a non-living system is to determine is that system is autopoietic. Autopoiesis means that a system is capable of maintaining and reproducing itself. The system is self-referring - it is constantly making itself. Human bodies are a system which continually produces itself. Our cells are constantly reproducing to make more of us. When we burn energy in our daily activities, our system takes in food and creates more of that energy. Our bodies are constantly creating life. We can compare this to a system that does not produce itself. In a factory, raw materials come in and a different product leaves. But the factory itself is run by other elements - electricity, workers, machines. To be an autopoietic system, the factory would have to be run by the raw materials coming in - like food for the body, the sheet metal, plastics, etc would have to keep the factory running and regenerating itself.
Honestly, I don't really find it all that surprising that scientists have pushed back the origin of homo sapiens 100,000 years. It's  hard to really conceptualize 100,000 years. Pretty much once we get over 10,000 years, I start to think about it as a realllly long time ago. Maybe if I had a better understanding of all that transpired in those 100,000 years I would find it more shocking. We seem to know so little about where and when we came from that it seems totally reasonable that our species began a realllly realllly (x10) long time ago.