The webinar of Sara Walker -- and J. England's paper.

[Ed Budding]

Sevgili grubumuz --

I entered a few short comments to the web discussion

about J. England's paper (Statistical Physics of Self Replication)

along the lines of our previous interactions on this.

But they did not appear on the website yet.

There seems to be a very large amount of comment by now

and I expect they will have to bring it to a stop soon

(if not already).

 

Regarding the webinar of Sara Walker

(see below) I thought there were some topics which

were useful for us, especially in the first half of the talk

(which covered the 2nd and 3rd items of the title).

But a lot of detail was glossed over very quickly.

 

For example -- Prof Walker did refer to a "day to night cycle"

in discussing the development of advantageous (in a Darwinian sense)

polymers -- and even showed how this had been modelled

in a short video (although with no mathematical details).

 

The second half of the talk -- on the development of heirachies --

has some connection to the second appendix to our paper,

but I found it a bit sketchy.

 

Someone asked about the possibility of free-ranging ribozymes

(i.e. outside of a celluar structure).  But Sara seemed to

indicate that this was not possible -- kind of by definition.

 

I found -- on that point --- as with Dr England's paper --

that there is a tendency to focus on individual life forms,

as they have evolved in the circumstances of the Earth --

and not consider the chemical energization of biospheres

in a general way.  Such a generalization would allow for the

temporary or intermediate presence of many chemical arrangements

not normally observed, or not retained, in an advanced phase

of the biosphere due to the continual role of selection --

or the development of 'eigenfunctions' of the biospheric

oscillatory energization.

 

Thus only certain features of the original RNA world may still be

present on the Earth, and even those may only exist

within cellular environments -- at the present time.

Even so, the general interactions of viroids in the surface

layers of the oceans seems a "great unknown" -- well, to me, that is.

I wonder if there are further thoughts on this in our group...? 

 

Might this provide a topic for us to present at the Nara meeting --

 

Ne dersiniz...?

 

Ed

 

 

Information Hierarchies, Chemical Evolution and the Transition From Non-Living to Living Matter