Just give us the one miracle of getting something from nothing and we will explain the rest!
I didn’t see the word “Virus” in there anywhere. Have we decided they aren’t alive again?
This theory didn’t strike me as particularly -new- so much as repainted with a fresh coat of wax.
The “Genetic Programming” by John Koza circa 1994 showed a lot of interesting features arising in purely programatic structures. The very short version is: If there exists sufficient individual building blocks, structure, organization, improvement, and complexity all appear to arrive pretty much immediately once there’s any inkling of “Surivial of the fittest”.
Meaning: Once there’s a single virus-like “critter” that can assemble a near identical copy given nothing but the nearby resources, the entire ball starts rolling. Viruses are orders of magnitude simpler than “cells”, but they undergo the pressures of “Survival of the fittest”.
My understanding is that viruses are thought to have evolved from complete cells, rather than the other way around.
Not a biologist, and some poking tells me ‘virus’ might require cells by definition, and thus not be exactly the term I’m looking for.
But I’m still thinking “The smallest pieces that might reasonably undergo natural selection” is the right starting point from a -statistical-likelyhood- basis. “100x bigger” is an enormous amount bigger when one thinks about the sheer statistical chance of arriving at ‘bare-minimum cell’ as opposed to ‘virus-like gene-bearing snippet that happens to manage reproduction from amino acid soup’. Think “chance is one over length-to-the-length power” sorts of scaling.
This is an interesting hypothesis. They have a long way to go before it is a theory though.
One of the biggest tests will be if they can reporduce the results in a lab. Computer models are great but can only take you so far.
Initial emergence of life need only happen once over many millions of years somewhere on the planet. A process near certain to happen at least once on those terms may be practically unobservable in a laboratory.
Or not even on this planet. It could have happened once billions of years ago in another galaxy and brought to us via asteroids or some other debris.
We’re not suppose to notice the jump from supersaturated chemical solution (stable over geologic time?) to RNA? Which even before RNA requires a precise amount of energy to roll uphill but not enough to destroy the whole thing? This is wanting to see a result so badly that common sense is shot, abandoned and nuked.
It always tiptoes around the elephant in the room, though. Why?
Why do these amazing chemicals that can self-replicate even exist?
Science can only ever explain the how, never the why.
“Why do these amazing chemicals that can self-replicate even exist?”
Because the laws of nature allow them? That would be where the real creativity lies, one would think.
Sure, fine. But, you’re just opening up the Matryoshka doll. Why are the laws of nature that way? If some entity did not design them that way, then they just happened. And, then what do you have? The Anthropic Principle? Pretty weak tea, that.
We modern, sophisticated people say miracles do not happen. Yet, the very existence of life is a miracle all in itself. We just don’t think of it as one because familiarity breeds contempt.
This could easily devolve into a sermon, which is funny, because I am not religious in nature. I don’t believe in believing in anything. I simply segregate information into categories of what I know, and what I do not know. And, I do not know how life came about.
Nor does anyone else. Nor do I anticipate that anyone ever will, except perhaps in a conditional sense (i.e., given the physical laws of the universe as we know them), no matter how many rationalizations they employ or elephants they ignore.
The Szostak lab has been doing experiments to try to build such protocells for years, with interesting partial results and a lot of publications.
Life itself is a template for research. Suppose this research is wildly successful. Where does that leave us? With intelligent guidance and precise conditions we may demonstrate a path from inanimate chemicals to a living cell which is made from those chemicals.
Proving nothing because we already know that life is composed of chemicals. We’ve then shown it can come about with intelligent direction and can’t happen randomly because no amount of time is enough.
Impossible may not be possible but it does have a working definition.
The final quote in the article sums up origins research pretty well: “If we assume [blah, blah, blah], then it’s certainly imaginable that [blah blah blah]. You never know.”
Just give us the one miracle of getting something from nothing and we will explain the rest!
I didn’t see the word “Virus” in there anywhere. Have we decided they aren’t alive again?
This theory didn’t strike me as particularly -new- so much as repainted with a fresh coat of wax.
The “Genetic Programming” by John Koza circa 1994 showed a lot of interesting features arising in purely programatic structures. The very short version is: If there exists sufficient individual building blocks, structure, organization, improvement, and complexity all appear to arrive pretty much immediately once there’s any inkling of “Surivial of the fittest”.
Meaning: Once there’s a single virus-like “critter” that can assemble a near identical copy given nothing but the nearby resources, the entire ball starts rolling. Viruses are orders of magnitude simpler than “cells”, but they undergo the pressures of “Survival of the fittest”.
My understanding is that viruses are thought to have evolved from complete cells, rather than the other way around.
Not a biologist, and some poking tells me ‘virus’ might require cells by definition, and thus not be exactly the term I’m looking for.
But I’m still thinking “The smallest pieces that might reasonably undergo natural selection” is the right starting point from a -statistical-likelyhood- basis. “100x bigger” is an enormous amount bigger when one thinks about the sheer statistical chance of arriving at ‘bare-minimum cell’ as opposed to ‘virus-like gene-bearing snippet that happens to manage reproduction from amino acid soup’. Think “chance is one over length-to-the-length power” sorts of scaling.
This is an interesting hypothesis. They have a long way to go before it is a theory though.
One of the biggest tests will be if they can reporduce the results in a lab. Computer models are great but can only take you so far.
Initial emergence of life need only happen once over many millions of years somewhere on the planet. A process near certain to happen at least once on those terms may be practically unobservable in a laboratory.
Or not even on this planet. It could have happened once billions of years ago in another galaxy and brought to us via asteroids or some other debris.
We’re not suppose to notice the jump from supersaturated chemical solution (stable over geologic time?) to RNA? Which even before RNA requires a precise amount of energy to roll uphill but not enough to destroy the whole thing? This is wanting to see a result so badly that common sense is shot, abandoned and nuked.
It always tiptoes around the elephant in the room, though. Why?
Why do these amazing chemicals that can self-replicate even exist?
Science can only ever explain the how, never the why.
“Why do these amazing chemicals that can self-replicate even exist?”
Because the laws of nature allow them? That would be where the real creativity lies, one would think.
Sure, fine. But, you’re just opening up the Matryoshka doll. Why are the laws of nature that way? If some entity did not design them that way, then they just happened. And, then what do you have? The Anthropic Principle? Pretty weak tea, that.
We modern, sophisticated people say miracles do not happen. Yet, the very existence of life is a miracle all in itself. We just don’t think of it as one because familiarity breeds contempt.
This could easily devolve into a sermon, which is funny, because I am not religious in nature. I don’t believe in believing in anything. I simply segregate information into categories of what I know, and what I do not know. And, I do not know how life came about.
Nor does anyone else. Nor do I anticipate that anyone ever will, except perhaps in a conditional sense (i.e., given the physical laws of the universe as we know them), no matter how many rationalizations they employ or elephants they ignore.
The Szostak lab has been doing experiments to try to build such protocells for years, with interesting partial results and a lot of publications.
http://molbio.mgh.harvard.edu/szostakweb/publications.html
Life itself is a template for research. Suppose this research is wildly successful. Where does that leave us? With intelligent guidance and precise conditions we may demonstrate a path from inanimate chemicals to a living cell which is made from those chemicals.
Proving nothing because we already know that life is composed of chemicals. We’ve then shown it can come about with intelligent direction and can’t happen randomly because no amount of time is enough.
Impossible may not be possible but it does have a working definition.
The final quote in the article sums up origins research pretty well: “If we assume [blah, blah, blah], then it’s certainly imaginable that [blah blah blah]. You never know.”