DNA Goes Binary

Anonymous Coward writes "Chemists in the United States have constructed the simplest possible genetic language. Like Morse or binary code, it has only two letters - but it can orchestrate some of the basic molecular reactions needed for life to evolve."

Comments

Re:Why 4 bases?

[Fnkmaster]

What you are doing is applying the anthropic principle, so-called because it is essentially an appeal to the fact that it is the way it is because we are here to ask it. Perhaps that sounds silly when reduced to its essence, but fundamentally what you are saying follows this basic pattern. The problem with this is trying to figure out what things, numbers or observations in our universe should be open to 'scientific explanation' and which should be written off to the anthropic principle. If you accept such a principle, it seems like you can essentially draw any arbitrary line and call the things on one side of the line open to scientific inquiry and the others not ("they just are that way" "why?" "just cuz." or "cuz you are here to ask why they are that way").

As a physicist by training (though not by profession), I take issue with this basic principle. The fine structure constant, e, pi, hbar, c.... these are all "weird" constants we observe in various places in the universe. Some of them have deeper meaning that we have discovered, or at least relationships that connect otherwise seemingly disparate areas of math, physics, or whatever. Some, as far as we know, are still arbitrary free parameters. As I remember it, the Standard Model currently has something like 5 or 6 free parameters in it.... if you fix these, you get all of modern physics to pop out (well, roughly like that). Are these random? Are they arbitrary? We don't know yet, but we shouldn't stop asking the questions.

Also, I know there are different forms of the anthropic principle (weak and strong) - I forget the exact distinction, and I believe what we are describing more or less corresponds to the strong form. The weak form is more watered down and palatable to a general scientific audience. :)

Re:Not exactly.

[Ieshan]

You're missing the point. You changed the form of the thing when you tried to fit it into a computer analogy.

It's a serious biological discovery, in some respects - it makes the DNA system more plausible on early earth, and it's a much simpler system which DNA could have grown out of.

Your analogy makes this sound like wasted effort "just to prove it's possible", their work is part of research to explain the evolution of the genome.