Slashdot Mirror
Chemical Evolution of Self-Replicating Molecules Observed In a Lab (nature.com)
New submitter n0w4k writes: Researchers at the University of Groningen have developed a self-replicating system able to not only pass hereditary information from one generation to another, but also mutate (non-paywalled link to the paper). It is a crucial step towards Darwinian evolution of abiotic species and artificial life. According to the authors and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, in order to fully reach this goal, a death mechanism needs to be implemented in the system. Otherwise new species can only form but not disappear.
Self-replicating chemical systems have been widely studied before; some were even able to mutate. However, this discovery provides the first example of mutating replicators which are fully artificial.
Full disclosure: I am one of the co-authors; you can ask me if you have some specific questions or suggestions — maybe they can be implemented in the lab!
Self-replicating chemical systems have been widely studied before; some were even able to mutate. However, this discovery provides the first example of mutating replicators which are fully artificial.
Full disclosure: I am one of the co-authors; you can ask me if you have some specific questions or suggestions — maybe they can be implemented in the lab!
I don't know where God is , but I do know the Devil is in the details with this sort of thing.
I would ask you to please don't let it get out of the lab.
You will probably reply: Bwahahahaha!
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
To me it's also obvious, but judging from the conversations with colleagues in the field (who are chemists, not evolutionary biologists), destruction of replicators is generally neglected. The challenge has been to just make molecules which can replicate and it is even more difficult to make them evolve because you need at least one bit of information that can assume 0 or 1 state, translated into chemical structures. Such error-prone replication process is enough to generate diversity of replicators but without extinction, the only selection pressure is on the replication efficiency and not survival.
The idea of reducing with Darwinian evolution to chemical kinetics (replication and destruction of replicators) has been nicely outlined by Addy Pross, who introduced the concept of dynamic kinetic stability:
dX/dt = kMX - gX,
where X is the concentration of the replicator, M is the concentration of 'food' and k and g are the rate constants (efficiencies) for the replication and destruction processes.
So far we only got the first part of the equation and colleagues from the lab got some promising results implementing the second part.
Agnostic here. IMHO we really have no way to think or talk about the origin problem. We can insert some placeholder, that semantically answers the question (like God started it all, or time goes back infinitely, or time started at the big bang), but ontologically, we still got nothin'. How do we make sense of a beginning with no previous moment ? Or an infinitely backward extending line of time ? Go ahead and act like the problem is resolved, but it is still an open question. And this is a problem because I have a belief that something, rather than nothing, exists, which raises these nasty origin questions.
I am responding to the post above, not how evolution got started, which is a somewhat smaller problem. The context of the above post was about how anything got started, a place you end up ultimately if you keep thinking about it. I am an agnostic because I think the burden of proof rests with those who make a positive claim. When I say I don't know, there is nothing I need to prove.