Prebiotic chemistry and origins of life (continued)...

[bloodline]

While I have a long and complex answer for you Karlos, one phrase that keeps repeating over and over in my mind is: "The Laws of Physics haven't changed in 3.5 billion years!"

By the way, you must be forgetting your crystal chemistry (or maybe you have sucessfully purged from your mind as I spend every waking hour trying to)... but Crystals are a classic example of a self replicating system and totally inorganic too!

[bloodline]

cecilia wrote:

Karlos wrote:

KennyR wrote:

RMKQLEEKVYELLSKVACLEYEVARLKKLVGE

What does that come out to as a triple word score in scrabble?

i thought it was welsh.


 :-D

Actually it's a small village a short way from Abergavenny.

[bloodline]

Karlos wrote:

bloodline wrote:

By the way, you must be forgetting your crystal chemistry (or maybe you have sucessfully purged from your mind as I spend every waking hour trying to)... but Crystals are a classic example of a self replicating system and totally inorganic too!

No, I didnt forget at all. But I don't regard crystal self assembly as comparable to biochemical where different systems are involved in a complex symbiotic process - eg proteins replicate DNA and transcribe it, but the DNA stores the information required to assemble the proteins.

Symmetry (dictated by ionic/covalent concerns) and close packing hardly compare to the above.

I personally see no difference, simply the scale of the problem, nothing more nothing less.

I also don't see why life didn't "hitch a ride" on a Crystaline scafholding before the complex RNA/DNA structures developed.

[bloodline]

blobrana wrote:
@ Karlos
>> there has been no significant (bio)chemical evolution for a very, very long time.

 Hum,
It seems to me that to have evolution in chemistry, then the carbon-based life forms have to have variation.
However, since there are only a set amount to amino acids then that narrows down diversification.
(The `best` are always used and survive)

I believe that the modern approach to evolution, envisages a contoured `landscape` that dictate the paths of evolution. The landscape being formed by random values such as the type of star we orbit, the gravity and composition of the earth, temperature and chemistry, etc…

Exactly my point... Physics is still the same as it always was.

[bloodline]

@karlos


Hahahaha! yeah, organic chemistry was never my fortè either :-D