Show me the metabolism, marconomics, part 3

"Kauffman is chiefly concerned with reproduction as the defining feature of life. He makes only a superficial discussion of metabolism that does not consider its central thermodynamic requirements. But ultimately, metabolism is what is most important."

This reminded me of an "alien life" forum that was discussing, among other things, how we would recognise life as we don't know it. There was a consensus that at a minimum, reproduction AND metabolism would need to be observed. However, when we are talking about abiogenesis, the conundrum is more about how they have to simultaneously come about. Meaningful reproduction is impossible without metabolism to generate the work energy that reproduces something. Metabolism is pretty useless if the system that metabolises is a one off that cannot be reproduced faithfully and it's important features "locked away" for future use. The blueprint of "the system" doesn't need metabolism to exist, it needs metabolism to perform work and reproduce.

"Without petrol, the most splendidly engineered automobile will just sit there. Without a plausible metabolism, the most elegant net of autocatalytic reactions is an empty exercise in symbol manipulation."

Why can't a car be considered a living thing for the purpose of this exercise? For that matter why can't a primitive stone axe head? They perform work and can be reproduced. The system graph and energy transfers is what is important in defining what metabolism and reproduction is, not our experience of how extremely complex things that we have studied intimately perform these same system graph characteristics. Thus things like, "mass flux", "high energy flux", "vesicles", "Proto-metabolism" etc. are not particular requirements when talking about the "system" before life as we know it. The energy graph is important for when metabolism is occurring, and that the system is locked away with reproducible features when the energy/reactants source is depleted. Thus if an axe head lies in the ground undisturbed for millions of years, it would be easy to reproduce. If it was being constantly bombarded by energy flux, ie. people using it, it would just wear away until it was no longer useful. Thus, an extremely encapsulated system, with persistent, naturally reproducible features is more relevant than looking at the amount of energy flux a motorcar needs to keep going, and applying it to the needs of an axe head.

"(1) Through a long and complicated process of prebiotic development containing all the most interesting parts of the story of the origin of life.

(2) As a system created by someone or something.

I don’t intend this as an argument in favour of intelligent design [see definition 1], still less of Intelligent Design [see definition 2]. Ockham’s razor suggests we should stick with explanation (1) unless we should find some very compelling evidence for (2). At any rate, the essential requirements of the pre-biotic processes leading to life based on the chemistry we know are going to be the same as the requirements of pre-biotic processes leading to life based on different chemistry."

Ockham s razor is a lie perpetrated by scientists to make out they have gnosis when they have none. Anyway, have you considered dust cloud life? Or plasma physics life?

We don't know that life that could create chemical life is based on chemistry. We have no gnosis on the requirements of life that may have generated biochemical life through an evolutionary prebiotic process of design. All we have is human experience of design as an evolutionary process with intelligent input. The intelligence is not enough to design something complicated from scratch, and thus the sequence of precedents from transistor to computer may be accessible to historians a million years into the future. Equally, whether intelligently designed or not, we should have confidence in the possibility of precedent biological life "designs" for us to discover.

"What I am arguing is that both the ‘RNA world’ and the ‘Protein world’ are historically late phenomena, and that the critical events for the origin of life lie much deeper."

I absolutely agree with this.

"There is no reason to expect that living systems today preserve the same chemistry of the first living systems. "

I absolutely *disagree* with this. Evolution and evolutionary design processes build on what is known to work. No point changing from silicon to something else.

Show me the Metabolism, Marcomony Part 2.

"What are the requirements a catalytic system of complex polymers (CSCP) must have in order to be relevant to the origin of life?
The CSCP must be secured from the overwhelming tendency of matter and energy to become more randomly distributed in the universe. "

Already here we can see the erosive characteristics of parsimony in action starting to create poisoned fruit. Having rejected Kauffman's model of the origin of life based on CSCP due to not being able to demonstrate metabolism or how it would self generate, it becomes the assumed system for the rest of the post. I would change it to thus: The CSCP or whatever other system relevant to the start of life, must be secured...

In fact when I read it, I had automatically added that to the sentence because a CSCP has a vanishingly small chance of being a descriptive model of what actually hapened. Thus, I agreed with the sentence with a proviso that it does not validate CSCP in any way as a transitionary proto life form.

Thus Marcomony would dictate that we look this as a systems problem rather than as a CSCP problem.

The minimum requirement from a systems perspective is that energy finds its way in, and that the inside can be made less random by making the outside more random. Although that does require at least some "food" or reactants matter to get in and some "waste" or products matter to get out, the minimalist in me is saying that the in could be mainly light, and the out mainly heat, as something non-living that could exist in nature.


Thus a CSCP may or may not be something that comes between non-life and life, or may have been skipped for something that could actually happen, rather than being a wish myth.

When I saw the diagram, I got all excited. When I read about specific chemistry, I got all confused. Not because I didn't understand, but because I was thinking purely in abstract terms of the following.

Condition 1: An Edge.
Condition 2:A Proto-metabolism.
Condition 3: A Selectively Permeable Edge.
Condition 4: A Complexifiable Proto-Metabolism.

Systems we have designed ourselves with a great deal of effort.


 in all this, all it had proved to me that CSCP to do all this is impossible in terms of all the pieces that are required to just come together for no reason.

This is why, about this time last year, I had decided that a comet could provide the required edge to the system, and a catalytic species X would be the resultant more complex, less random thing being generated within the comet(s). The comet surface makes a natural, non-living edge.

Of course, we will have opportunities to see what is in comets now, as an indication of what may have been happening 4 billion years ago.

Show Me the Metabolism, Marcomony! Part one

This is in response to History of life posts by my arch nemesis Herr Fellows of Parsimony fame.

"My thesis is that the network of catalytic polymers and substrates that Kauffman postulates as an initial self-organising complex system which can give rise to more lifelike systems is so inordinately complex and unlikely that it in no way addresses the crucial problem of the origin of life."

Completely agree. I would even extend that to say that it is probably impossible.

"Any chemist would ask: 'What is driving this cycle of reactions? Where is the energy coming from? What is preventing this system from dissipating?'

There is no such thing as 'Order for Free'. That is the Law. If you want order at point A, you need to dump your disorder at points not-A. Should anyone claim there is such a thing as 'Order for Free', let them be unto you even as the homeopaths and the creationists."

 

Absolutely. It is a very contrived system that is required, and a plausible natural mechanism is required that would probably  generate it (Not *possibly* generate it - it needs a contrived repeatable mechanism that we would think hah! that just could work if I could repeat the conditions precisely)

 

Metabolism is the key. My thought is that any systems which generates copies of something is showing metabolism anyway. You can see energy being burned in the suns in the sky and emanating from the hot cores of planets and dumped randomly into the rest of the universe. There are not just a few planets and suns - They have imperfect copies of themselves all over the universe. It is a loose use of metabolism and reproduction, but the universe is full of things that make their outside more random and are reproduced somehow.

 

 

Marco's Razor & Marcomony

Occam's Razor states that "entities should not be multiplied uneccessarily".When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question.

In science, parsimony is preference for the least complex explanation for an observation. This is generally regarded as good when judging hypotheses.

Marco's razor states that in cases of imperfect and only circumstantial evidence, entities should be added/multiplied to obtain hypotheses that explain the most unusual aspects of the limited circumstantial evidence available.

Marcomony is a preference for explanations which explain the most about the variability of observations, even if the observations fit within a simpler explanation.

These rules of thumb are ideal for game theory in the analysis of geopolitics. These are the reasons:
1) There really are more entities in these situations. By introducing "representative" entities one at a time to the simplest models, more of the circumstancial evidence can make a best fit.

2)With some entities actively keeping secrets and there being interdependencies more of the information is partial/uncertain.

For game theory in the analysis of geopolitics eg. the Israel-Palestine conflict is simplified to a two entity game in game theory and most arm-chair strategy discussions. A simple addition of a third entity keeps the overall strategy simple enough for the layperson to examine and analyse while explaining better the unusual aspects of the conflict (in this case, the multi-generational longevity of the conflict, the lack of success from mediators)

In evolutionary science occam's razor seems to have been liberally used to simplify explanation of evolution. These have evolved to a raft of "rules", such as the Weismann Barrier, Central Dogma of evolution etc. which are taken as gospel within scientific papers. Challenges to these "rules" are taken as challenges to the overall theory of evolution, which they need not be.

The main motivation with these improved rules of thumb is to:
a) Avoid cliched science such that researchers do not truthify the oversimplifications that are the norm in the reporting of science.
b) Avoid the human instinct to extend the presumption of innocence/truth-telling to dicussions irrelevant to the enforcement or judgement of law.


Another example is the choice between exogenesis and geogenesis theories. All we have as evidence that pertains to this is circumstancial and imperfect. The usual rules of thumb dictate that geogenesis is the least complex explanation. There is no real "data" to fit into a model, but exogenesis explains more of the unusual aspects of the properties of dna based life.