Virus-driven origin of life
(click to enlarge)On the Origins of Life
A new experimental system demonstrates that precursors of ribonucleotides, amino acids, and lipids may have simultaneously arisen from the same prebiotic chemistry.
By Jef Akst | March 17, 2015
โThis is a very important paper,โ Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist and origin-of-life researcher…
See also: Luis P. Villarreal: We Need a Nonlinear Language for Life
Nobelist Jack Szostak has told me this about autocatalytic sets: the people who came up with the original idea, like Stuart Kauffman, rather than admit being wrong kept changing their story until it was basically the same concept everybody was already working on.
My comment: Researchers continue working on “origin of life” issues but they ignore Villarreal’s perspective. It links viral microRNAs and the anti-entropic epigenetic effects of nutrient-dependent microRNAs from entropic elasticity to epigenesis and epistasis manifested in cell type differentiation in all genera.
“Origin of life” theorists seem to be stuck with theoretical physics that cannot be linked via RNA-mediated amino acid substitutions to the biophysically constrained chemistry of RNA-mediated protein folding that differentiates all animal cell types.
Will Kauffman and others keep changing their story until it is the same one told by Villarreal? If not, will they simply accept the fact that they’ve been wrong about cell type differentiation for at least 50 years.
Dobzhansky (1964) wrote:
…the only worthwhile biology is molecular biology. All else is “bird watching” or “butterfly collecting.” Bird watching and butterfly collecting are occupations manifestly unworthy of serious scientists!
Dobzhansky (1973) wrote:
…the so-called alpha chains of hemoglobin have identical sequences of amino acids in man and the chimpanzee, but they differ in a single amino acid (out of 141) in the gorilla.
Excerpted from this article:
Sutherland and his colleagues found that hydrogen cyanide, along with hydrogen sulfide and UV light, could spawn not just precursors of ribonucleotides, but also the building blocks of amino acids…
That suggests viral microRNAs and nutrient-dependent microRNAs are driving cell type differentiation via RNA-mediated amino acid substitutions that stabilize protein folding in the organized genomes of species from microbes to man. Ifย Villarreal is right, everyone will need to change their story to the one that accurately represents how the virus-driven origin of life led to cell type differentiation via light-induced amino acid substitutions in plants and nutrient-dependent pheromone-controlled amino acid substitutions in all animals.
See also: No need for extrasolar delivery by comet: Nitrogen fingerprint in biomolecules could be from early Sun
Ammonia molecules, a nitrogen atom bound to three hydrogen atoms, makes up a fundamental chemical group, the ‘amines’ the characterize amino acids, which link up in long chains to form proteins.
Quantum Criticality at the Origin of Life (co-author Stuart A. Kauffman)
The number of proteins grows exponentially with the number n of amino acids…
That story may start with “Let there be light” and the differentiation of cell types by nutrient-dependent microRNAs that repair the DNA damage caused by viral microRNAs.
In any case, the story does not seem to start with mutations and evolution. Does it?
See also: Chemists claim to have solved riddle of how life began on Earth
