Quote:
Originally Posted by adman
Functional proteins are almost certainly a much more recent development in the processes of life, and as Craig says above the main initial requirement for kick-starting life is the appearance of self-organising and self replicating non-living 'cells' or vesicles. These entities have a much more palatable chance of appearing - indeed given the right mixture, are almost inevitable. It is my belief that the 'universe geared towards life' you were talking about is nothing more exotic than molecules simply following the path of least thermodynamic resistance (so to speak).
Adam
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Have you thought about what that really means?
That you can crank out 'life', i.e. a system that defies the 2nd law of thermodynamics by molecules following a set of simple rules that follow the 'path of least thermodynamic resistance'.
That the simple reductionist laws of physics have within them a 'formula' for creating life is a total 180 over current thinking, it would mean that life is either not as complex or information rich as we think it is (that we are the equivalent of Pi for instance - looks information rich, aperiodic and random but is in fact a simple calculation), or that how we believe the universe works is wrong.
People make the statement all that time, that a simple process that follows the known laws of physics can lead to life, without thinking of the ramifications of that statement.
Szostack's work has not yet been successful, despite years of work and extremely contrived conditions, he has not yet managed a spontaneous basic RNA replicator from scratch. This is despite hand picking in vitro combinations from trillions of unlikely ones.
http://www.hhmi.org/research/investigators/szostak.html
His work is important, it shows potentially more simple "life forms" than anything that exists today, but even the model he proposes still has greater than astronomical odds of forming randomly.
We know bugger all about life, or about how it may have begun. There may be some basic protocell that will spontaneously form and have enough complexity to have a 'software' system that can push against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, but if there is, then it means we need some new theories of physics to explain it.