Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Hence the reason no computer architect assigns all the codes! ;-)

You have to read the literature on this. There is a lot of thought given to ways in which a 1-base code could evolve into a 2-base code, and so forth. In particular, if early life employed fewer amino acids, the trick is to keep binding the original amino acids while opening up the binding of new ones. Remember, we have all of chemistry at our disposal.

Check out the wobble hypothesis:

https://teaching.ncl.ac.uk/bms/wiki/inde...Hypothesis

Another line of evidence is that the tRNA's anticodon loop and its amino acid acceptor appear to have evolved separately. So the anticodon could evolve independently of the associated amino acid.

Another interesting paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810241/

~~ Paul

Paul, before we delve into all that, can you explain what you mean by evolve in a world where we don't yet have any genes? I just don't know what you mean, unless you mean that things might pop up through random chemistry.

There is a place in J Scott Turner's book (which I hope you are going to read) in which he discusses the problems faced by pre-life. He points out that sheer diffusion is against all this hypothetical pre-life chemistry. If some wonderful new chemical forms accidentally in such an environment, it will simply diffuse away because there are no cell boundaries.

Perhaps you should give us some sort of speculative ordering for all these stages:

1) Cells without active transport across their membranes.

2) Cells with active transport across their membranes.

3) A chemical that reproduces itself.

4) The formation of some sort of genetic code.

5) The capacity to evolve by natural selection.

Without a clear ordering, it is all too easy to assume a process such as evolution that can't exist at that stage in the bootstrap process.

Hence the reason no computer architect assigns all the codes! ;-

Yes I know, but I didn't want the analogy to expand to the size of a computer architecture manual The point is that those few unassigned codes then get used as prefix codes for longer instructions - so the codes end up with irregular lengths. DNA is beautifully regular - 3 bases (or six bits if you like) per codon.


David