/ratanon/ - Rationalists Anonymous

The word you're looking for is abiogenesis. Use that to look for writing by people who know what they're doing,

But here's a quick, probably inaccurate starter.

Proteins are chains of amino acids. Amino acids can form naturally under early Earth conditions, they're relatively simple molecules. Proteins can work as catalysts, helping the formation of certain other molecules. A protein could have formed that worked as a catalyst for (proteins similar to) itself and built up from there. It's not very likely to happen, unless you have all the world's oceans to work with for half a billion years or so, in which case it might be.

Basic lipid cell membranes are known to occur naturally and assemble into a cell-like shape, so that innovation is inexpensive.

>>12631

Ok thanks. I'll read up. Any short innacurate answer why the replication started ?

Why didn't life "immediatly die" after it started ?

This might be a case of asking the wrong questions but it's been seriously bugging me.

>>12632

If something gets assembled that will on average reproduce more often than it will die, then you can get more of that thing, possibly exponentially so.

Most things that were in principle capable of replicating may not have made that bar, and did immediately die. But it only takes one.

>>12634

Relevant part

>This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments

If the theory behind this is correct, it would probably rather lead to minerals forming that absorb a lot of light.

(There certainly is an *evolutionary* advantage to being an efficient heat engine, i.e. absorb sunlight and radiate excessive heat efficiently, so one wouldn't need any new physics to explain what self-replicators tend to look like, once they are around.)

It is very much possible btw that Earth is one of very few planets in the universe to develop life at all. Emergence of self-replicators might therefore not be a once-in-ten-billion-years-per-planet-surface event, but might be billions of times more rare.

"Spontaneous fine-tuning to environment in many-species chemical reaction networks"

http://www.pnas.org/content/114/29/7565

"Self-Organized Resonance during Search of a Diverse Chemical Space"

https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.038001

"DNA as UV light–harvesting antenna"

https://academic.oup.com/nar/article-pdf/46/7/3543/24677199/gkx1185.pdf

"DNA Denaturing through Photon Dissipation: A Possible Route to Archean Non-enzymatic Replication"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6027432/

"Robust self-replication of combinatorial information via crystal growth and scission"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3340064/

"Vortex flows impart chirality-specific lift forces"

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6640

"Ice as a protocellular medium for RNA replication"

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1076

>>12640

Thanks for this. I'm kinda brainlet when it comes to math,like I didn't understand all the math from the study posted in the article above but it won't stop me from trying to understand.