

New model may explain emergence of self-replication on early Earth - dnetesn
http://phys.org/news/2015-07-life-emergence-self-replication-early-earth.html

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kanzure
Although not a chemical mechanism, it seems that a randomly generated set of
initial operations once executed tends to develop into self-replication:
[http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20se...](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/ai/The%20evolution%20of%20self-
replicating%20computer%20organisms%20-%20A.%20N.%20Pargellis.pdf)

Ligation (append) is a necessary precursor operation, I think.

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Gravityloss
So once we go deeper into computer generated programs, we might accidentally
start creating self replicating programs...

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mangeletti
Accidentally?

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Gravityloss
Yes, that was the point of my post. I think it's obvious that everyone on
Hacker News is aware of purposefully created computer viruses and worms.

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dekhn
I've seen every single detail in the phys.org previously described, including
the quantitative part. THis is spectacularly unoriginal reporting on really
duplicative science.

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fcharchtn
Speaking only for myself, I have not read about this specific research before,
so I thought that the article was fascinating. It is unfortunate that you
though that this article about a proposed mechanism for the origin of life on
Earth was spectacularly unoriginal.

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dekhn
I wouldn't have a problem with it if the authors didn't claim it was novel or
original. As an introduction to the concept, the article is fine.

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java-man
Self-sustained Replication of an RNA Enzyme (2009)

Tracey A. Lincoln, Gerald F. Joyce

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652413/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2652413/)

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spiritplumber
I'd like to see a creationist response to this. They tend to either reduce to
"No, because the book says otherwise" or be legitimately inventive.

Wonder what a creationist lab would look like...

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valine
As a creationist who has a very rudimentary understanding of chemistry and
biology, I can tell you that my first reaction to this model is to look at its
apparent reliance on a fairly complex template and assume (correctly or
incorrectly) that this template is too complicated to be derived by chance in
a single, finite universe. I then decide that I would rather believe in an
infinite God rather than an infinite number of theoretical universes, and at
which point I stop reading hacker news and go back to work. Please note that
this comment is intended to provide a creationist's initial reaction to an
article for anyone curious, not to debate the origin of the universe.

~~~
Cogito
What leads you to think that the templates are necessarily very complex?

In my reading, the models requires the presence of polymers, let's call them
_A_ , _B_ , and _T_ ; and a cyclical mechanism that causes these polymers to
alternately bind to each other and release each other (through chain to chain
ionic or hydrogen bonds).

The polymers themselves are formed of chains of smaller monomers covalently
bonded to each other.

 _A_ , _B_ , and _T_ are floating around, and occasionally bind to each other.
The nature of our template _T_ is such that both _A_ and _B_ can bind to it at
the same time. Importantly, _T_ doesn't need to be much larger, or more
complex, than _A_ or _B_ , just able to bind to one of the ends of each.

So we have our polymers floating around looking something like (this is my
purely made up notation):

    
    
        *A*: AAaAaA   *B*: BbbBbBB
        
        *T*: TTaAabBBT
    

They move into the night cycle, causing them to bind to each other with ionic
or hydrogen bonds:

    
    
        AAaAaA BbbBbBB
           ||| |||
         TTaAa-bBBT
    

Due to the ends of the _A_ and _B_ chains now being so close to each other,
they form a covalent bond, resulting in a new polymer chain _C_ :

    
    
        *C*: AAaAaABbbBbBB
                ||||||
              TTaAabBBT
    

The day cycle comes around and the template breaks away from the newly created
chain.

Thus the template is acting like a catalyst, able to create many identical
copies of this polymer _C_. _C_ is a more complex polymer than either _A_ or
_B_ and could easily become a template itself.

It's not much of a stretch to then consider a polymer which either was a
template for itself, or was part of a sequence of templates that produced each
other.

To your complexity point, it doesn't seem obvious that these templates are
necessarily "fairly complex" \- indeed if you admit the existence of polymer
chains in the first place the ability for one of them to act as a template
seems trivial.

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sciencerobot
Of course! The Earth is a giant thermocycler.

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hodwik
Shoot, I was hoping this was going to be about Jeremy England.

