Re: Clay
- From: Bill Morse <wdNOSPAmorse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:53:43 GMT
Perplexed in Peoria wrote:
"Tim Tyler" <seemysig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:jqjCi.34210$g.3831@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
The sense of what holding a conversation with
spintronic is like should be beginning to make
itself obvious about now.
I'm still amazed he's been able to string you along
even this far. His universal rabid state is usually
much more in evidence this far into an exchange.
Enjoy your tussle with the tar baby, Tim.
You were adequately warned.
Yes, well - the point of this discussion from
my point of view only becomes apparent if I
say something stupid enough to goad Perplexed
into responding.
Something like: "cells with their genes on the
*outside*: how dumb is that?" - perhaps.
However I'm not yet sure how I'm going to work
something like that into the conversation ;-)
Genes with their phenotypes in grooves? How stupid is
that?
Organisms needing monomers to reproduce, and unable to
build monomers themselves, evolving a wall around themself
to keep the monomers out? How stupid is that?
Organisms needing monomers to reproduce, and unable
to build monomers themselves, evolving the ability
to build monomers - which then diffuse away into the
'soup'? How stupid is that?
The only things I am completely sure about regarding
abiogenesis are (1) you need some kind of containment
to evolve a metabolism under natural selection, and
(2) almost any conceivable container which keeps intermediate
metabolites in will keep raw materials out.
Well - perhaps not if the intermediate metabolites are still bound to
relatively large molecules. The other alternative is that the reaction
rates are high enough that diffusion rates are relatively very low, but
that requires very good catalysts, which would seem to require considerable
evolution first. Now here is where I like clay minerals but not the same
way that Tim likes them. Clay minerals could serve as the large molecules
that bind the crude catalysts and the intermediate metabolites, which
solves (2) above.
Hence, the key problem in any metabolism-first scheme is to
somehow have containment without the usual kinds of containers.
Wachtershauser solved this problem. The container IS the contents.
I don't like this solution on the basis of my intuition - it seems to me
that reproduction should include both a container and contents.
Of course, the Cairns-Smith approach is not metabolism-first.
It is genes-first. And it solves the characteristic problems
of genes-first (namely, where do the monomers come from?) in an
equally clever fashion.
So that leaves the question of whether it is easier for genes
to invent metabolism or for metabolism to invent genes. My
intuition says metabolism invented genes. On the outside, at
first, because that is where the phosphate was.
I think on this I may have to agree with Tim that the sequence is not
important.
Yours, Bill Morse
.
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