God proving his existence

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On Mon, Feb 15, 1999 at 12:36:09PM -0800, Thomas Dervartanian wrote:

> Is it correct to say then that you believe that human systems are 

> relatable to digital systems?  


I don't know that I mentioned "human systems" anywhere 'till now, and I'd
certainly not tell you that a straight face that these systems were
relatable to human beings.  What I'm talking about is the fact that these
human-created systems can, for some reason or another, be talked about very
well with the vocabulary of evolution, and seem to show that certain things
which are presented as "difficulties in evolution" happen automatically
(one wishes to say "naturally") in these systems without explicit
intervention.

It's not that there's some sort of one-to-one correspondance between
elements of these synthetic systems and the hypothetical prehistoric (and
prebiotic, in the case of some of these systems) conditions on earth; It's
quite a bit fuzzier than that.  But, as I say, some "difficulties"
evolution is supposed to have, are just automatically overcome in these
systems---which, to me, lends plausibility to the claim that (even if we
don't know exactly how) it happened in our own system.


> Could you please name which chemical processes which could lead to life 

> have been found?  If you are about to name the formation of amino acids, 

> which I won't argue against now, be sure to include an explanation of 

> Chirality without DNA.  


[1] is an article about how the weak nuclear force seems to explain
"homochirality", or the presence of only one of the two kinds of various
chiral molecules:
	Thus an initially very tiny excess of one hand catalyses
	formation of slightly more of that hand, so that there is a
	slightly larger excess at the next stage of the reaction, which
	catalyses the production of a still larger excess leading, over
	an evolutionary timescale (actually only about 10 000 years)
	to complete homochirality. We have calculated the PVED for a
	large range of important biomolecules, and in almost all cases
	the hand that appears in nature is indeed the one favoured by the
	weak force. Almost all of the natural L-amino acids we studied
	were indeed more stable than their "unnatural" D mirror images,
	and natural right-handed DNA and RNA is also favoured by the
	weak force.
Unfortunately, there are no links or references to the actual scholarly
papers, though a search for the name of the author should turn up
something.

Chirality discarded, there are more than enough (probably mutually
exclusive) theories out there.  Self-catalysing polymer networks.  RNA.
Replicating Proteins.  I don't know what else, I haven't read any
measurable fraction of the literature, and I can't toss buzzwords about
it half as well as I'd like.  Since we can never actually go back and check
out how close the leading theories come to capturing what really happened,
I find it far more interesting to see what really does happen in these
manmade systems.

Jeff
-- 
\/ http://www.freshmeat.net/                     Jeff Epler jepler@inetnebr.com
Life is cheap, but the accessories can kill you.

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