Amazing! Douglas Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher, Bach" introduces a formal system called Typogenetics designed to resemble the system of RNA and DNA and its replication. He poses the question of the shortest psuedo-RNA chain that can self-replicate. He doesn't provide a solution in the book but plenty have been found online. I had no idea there was also a solution for the _real thing_!
Spiegelman's Monster
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Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither fire nor crystals mutate. That's the thing. A crystals arrangement of its microscopic structure will always be the same, as will the oxidation reaction in fire. A virus undergoes darwinian evolution and will adapt to its environment
Crystals actually do mutate, the crystallization process is not perfect and introduces defects.
that's not what mutation means.
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
The monster itself is just a strand of RNA. The definition of living by most biologists wouldn't include a strand of genetic material. Fire replicates in particular environments, as do viruses. But we don't typically classify either as living. I think the point you're getting at is that the distinction between living and non-living is a bit arbitrary and meaningless. I agree.
the operational definition agreed on in mainstream science is that to be living, you have to do regulated metabolism. This definition mainly exists to distinguish viruses from cells; I'm sure there are even cells which don't metabolize, but those are exceptional cases in which the ability to metabolize was lost in a parasitic situation.
Spiegelman's monster isn't alive under any common definition of alive, but it has fascinating properties nonetheless and appears to be an attractor in the RNA sequence space, which is quite interesting on its own.
Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#34Re: Spiegelman's Monster
#35The Wikipedia page doesn't do the best job at conveying the idea of the experiment, in my opinion. We've long been searching and wondering about the origin of life (aka abiogenesis). The famous Miller-Urey experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment ) demonstrated that conditions similar to early Earth (plus lightning) spontaneously creates important organic compounds that are necessary…
One fascinating detail on how the RNA adapted to its environment: Spiegelman was giving each generation very little time to reproduce. This created an environment favorable to RNA strings that could reproduce quickly. These strings were shorter, reducing the amount of time they needed to reproduce.
I learned about this "monster" from reading a Great Courses book on Information Science. Apparently the molecular "organism" is fascinating to information theorists because it evolved to have less information in response to an environment where more information, and the burden of longer-replication times, was unfavorable.