Re: Evolution does not get started until there are replicators.

On Dec 4, 5:30 pm, Primary AL <aavery6...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
An origin of life, anywhere, consists of the chance arising of a self-
replicating entity. Nowadays, the replicator that matters on Earth is
the DNA molecule, but the original replicator probably was not DNA.
We don't know what it was. Unlike DNA, the original replicating
molecules cannot have relied upon complicated machinery to duplicate
them. Although, in some sense, they must have been equivalent to
"Duplicate me" instructions, the "language" in which the instructions
were written was not a highly formalized language such that only a
complicated machine could obey them. The original replicator cannot
have needed elaborate decoding, as DNA instructions... do today. Self-
duplication was an inherent property of the entity's structure just
as, say, hardness is an inherent property of a diamond... the original
replicators, unlike their later successors the DNA molecules, did not
have complicated decoding and instruction-obeying machinery, because
complicated machinery is the kind of thing that arises in the world
only after many generations of evolution. And evolution does not get
started until there are replicators. In the teeth of the so-called
"Catch-22 of the origin of life"... the original self-duplicating
entities must have been simple enough to arise by the spontaneous
accidents of chemistry

Atweel, but whit abuit it?

~Iain

.

Relevant Pages