Re: Three essays on the origin of life

Chris Gordon-Smith wrote:
Tim Tyler wrote:

Far more important clues about our earliest ancestors
come from an examination of how they overcame error
catastrophes in their genomes - rather than
considerations of where they got their juice from.

I agree with the overall point. It seems to me that understanding the Origin
of Life is about understanding how evolution started. That means finding
units that can reproduce, try alternative phenotypes, and 'remember' more
effective phenotypes when they find them.

My personal preference is to avoid the term 'genome' when describing the
Origin of Life problem. It seems to imply that we are assuming that the
solution to the problem includes a template replicating molecule. The
moment we make that assumption, we come up against the error catastrophe
and Eigen's paradox.

There are other ways to remember information that do not require templates.

I presume the term "template" has different connotations for you and I.

There are essentially two ways of information persisting - one involves
copying it; the other involved making it long-lived.

If you are copying it, I don't see much of a problem with referring to
that
which is copied as the 'template' for the copy.

Making information long-lived is all very well - but it doesn't lead to
much in the way of evolution and natural selection.

Eigen's paradox assumes base pairs and enzymes are involved. It
reckons without the natural error correction mechanisms involved in
crystal growth processes - which need no genetic encoding to function.

By the time base pairs and enzymes came on the scene, there was already
a large complex ecosystem in existence - and factors such as
cooperation
render the paradox pointless - via mechanisms such as the one described
on:

http://originoflife.net/complexity/

.