Topic: Dual origin?
+Anonymous A — 10.6 years ago #44,353
Freeman Dyson has promoted a "dual origin" theory of the start of life. Breaking down life into hardware (proteins) and software (DNA and RNA), he speculates that living systems could have started out as proteins, needing no particular software to function, only reacting in a hardware fashion. Then some infection by early DNA occurred, and it became useful for the hardware to make use of DNA to store information.
We already know amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) form naturally. RNA seems to be able to self-assemble under certain conditions. Did life have a dual origin? Did purely information-carrying molecules infect life's basic hardware, a fortunate event since it allowed life to encode information and become more structurally flexible?
+FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI — 10.6 years ago, 43 minutes later[T] [B] #485,151
fascinating.
+RedCream — 10.6 years ago, 9 hours later, 10 hours after the original post[T] [B] #485,168
That poasting seems... familiar.
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