Month: September 2022

HIGH FIDELITY CHEMICAL INFORMATION. "Their new research found that it is possible to design a mechanism for copying chemical information very accurately without relying on biological enzymes to assemble and separate sequence copies." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE DRIVERS. "Instead, the researchers relied only on simple kinds of attachments—molecular binding and unbinding reactions that they designed—and mechanical forces." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

RANGE OF INFORMATION. "Having shown that information can be made to chemically self-replicate...the question becomes, what kinds of messages can be copied in this way?" https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

TYPES OF COPIABLE INFORMATION. "Our theoretical work suggests that not just linear sequences but also patterns in two dimensions, similar to wallpaper patterns that repeat every so often, could also be replicated," https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

TOO SIMPLE. "The crystals used in the study simply copied information verbatim from layer to layer as they grew, which in itself is insufficient to kick-start a Darwinian evolutionary process." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

CRYSTAL NATURAL SELECTION. "But crystal growth that produces complex patterns resulting in 2- or 3-dimensional structures would, in this context, correspond to a rudimentary "genotype-phenotype" relationship, thereby enriching the Darwinian evolutionary process by introducing complex forms that would be subject to selective pressures." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

MANY OPTIONS IN CHEMICAL SYSTEMS. "Our findings show that there is a bewildering variety of imaginable ways that chemical systems could self-replicate and evolve." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

OTHER POSSIBILITIES. "This really puts into question whether or not the way biology does things now is the only possible way that life could be organized on a molecular level." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend with the ongoing historical snippet about transferable memory in animals. A firestorm was created by the first publication of such a finding in platyhelminthes, which initiated a flood of publications that tried to reproduce the phenomena, but with very mixed success. Recently, new methods have been applied, with surprising results. View in LinkedIn

DIFFERENCES OF OPINION. "Still, McConnell believed that eventually the data would win out, and many eminent psychologists, Donald Hebb, Harry Harlow, Karl Pribram, and Gordon Bower among them, fully supported his efforts, even though they did not share his interpretation of his results. In fact, up until 1965, McConnell was, as he put it, “riding high.” https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn