Delmar
2019-20 Iggy Co-Winner Leading Frosh Scorer
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2013
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From the Taurean Thompson thread this summer:
"The chicken or egg problem is okay. But the problem of how the very first "living" cell coming into existence has always been a more fascinating problem to me. Life first showed up at least 3.8 billion years ago, which is about 750 million years after Earth was formed. All kinds of molecules needed for life have been created in the laboratory but never life from dirt. It has been shown that there are certain types of ribonucleotide molecules that have self-replicating properties. Combine that with primordial soup on earth with billions and billions of slime bubbles made of phospholipids and you begin to get the idea of what happened. It kind of boggles the mind to think about the chances that one of those slime bubbles would be formed having just the right amount of self-replicating ribonucleotides in such a pattern where chemical feedback mechanisms would create the potential for replication and continuation by having two identical copies each having the same level of potential for replication. The number of possible of patterns of molecules within slime bubbles is astronomically high. But given 750 million years of time and trillions and trillions of slime bubbles pretty much guarantees that a pattern of viable self-replicating ribonucleotides contained in a slime bubble made of phospholipids would eventually occur in spite of all the astronomical probabilities. If you throw the dice enough times eventually you will get snake eyes!"
"The chicken or egg problem is okay. But the problem of how the very first "living" cell coming into existence has always been a more fascinating problem to me. Life first showed up at least 3.8 billion years ago, which is about 750 million years after Earth was formed. All kinds of molecules needed for life have been created in the laboratory but never life from dirt. It has been shown that there are certain types of ribonucleotide molecules that have self-replicating properties. Combine that with primordial soup on earth with billions and billions of slime bubbles made of phospholipids and you begin to get the idea of what happened. It kind of boggles the mind to think about the chances that one of those slime bubbles would be formed having just the right amount of self-replicating ribonucleotides in such a pattern where chemical feedback mechanisms would create the potential for replication and continuation by having two identical copies each having the same level of potential for replication. The number of possible of patterns of molecules within slime bubbles is astronomically high. But given 750 million years of time and trillions and trillions of slime bubbles pretty much guarantees that a pattern of viable self-replicating ribonucleotides contained in a slime bubble made of phospholipids would eventually occur in spite of all the astronomical probabilities. If you throw the dice enough times eventually you will get snake eyes!"
