Hi Prof. Standish Thanks so much for the offer. I actually hunted the paper down from a link in the original springer resource you posted. Some of it flies over my head, but not all of it, so I'll persevere...
"ISTM that you are implicitly assuming that these replicating hypercycles only emerged once, whereas I would think that replicating RNA probably arose many times quite easily when life wasn't around to gobble them up." Not really, but re-reading your original post I'm actually quite persuaded by the idea that even if these replicating mechanisms emerged very rarely it would be possible and enough to invoke the anthropic principle. After all, it only had to emerge once in the whole universe for these questions to get asked... Whats niggling me though is something else. Dawkins sometimes intimates that the current code was something that itself evolved from low to high fidelity. For reasons I've made I can't see how that can be so. Evolution is a process where beneficial but random changes accumulate and are passed on through successive generations. But if a random mutation in the code results in catastrophe as Dawkins acknowledges then that can't happen. This is to say that if the code evolved then that evolution could not be Darwinian in nature. I find it reassuring that there is research underway addressing this issue. I found this paper over my lunch break: http://www.pnas.org/content/103/28/10696.full They emphasize ambiguity over error in early coding mechanisms and suggest a kind of Lamarkian evolutionary dynamic that existed prior to and eventually gave way to Darwinian evolutionary dynamics. Horizontal vs. vertical heredity etc. In many ways that might be seen as heresy by the biological community but laymen like me don't mind a little heresy here and there. We don't know any better. :) Anyway, it seems to offer the following response to Statham. His argument is underpinned by the assumption that all evolution is Darwinian. If one sheds that assumption then the code could evolve without the consequent catastrophe. All the best. > Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2013 14:02:33 +1000 > From: li...@hpcoders.com.au > To: everything-list@googlegroups.com > Subject: Re: Serious proof of why the theory of evolution is wrong > > Hi Chris, > > You can probably find all that you need here > http://physis.sourceforge.net/ > > It looks like it is a defunct research programme, but maybe you could > follow up citations. > > I could probably dig out an e-copy of the ECAL paper from my > institution's Springerlink subscription, if you're really interested. > > Further comments interspersed > > On Wed, Aug 07, 2013 at 01:03:36AM +0000, chris peck wrote: > > > > > > Hi Prof. Standish > > > > Unfortunately my subscription to Athens ran out a long time ago and I don't > > have access to the paper you mention. > > > > I'm still not sure you've addressed the crux of the argument. Lets say you > > have a bunch of codons that when processed by a replicating mechanism spit > > out a bunch of amino acids. Lets say the replicating system isn't optimized > > and has low redundancy so that > > > > codonA -> aa1 > > codonB -> aa2 > > codonC -> aa3 > > > > Now there is a random mutation in the mechanism that ought to offer some > > redundancy: > > > > codonA -> aa1 > > codonB -> aa1 > > codonC -> aa2 > > codonD -> aa3 > > > > Unless there has been a concomitant mutation in the DNA strands the > mechanism will process, this 'optimization' is in fact catastrophic. > > That is what I was referring to as the boundary being unstable. The > two schema cannot coexist at the same location. What I had in mind was > that they existed contemporaneously, but in different physical > locations - eg different rock pools perhaps. > > ISTM that you are implictly assuming that these replicating > hypercycles only emerged once, whereas I would think that replicating > RNA probably arose many times quite easily when life wasn't around to > gobble them up. > > > -- > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Principal, High Performance Coders > Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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