Month: September 2022

ANALOG CHEMISTRY. "In analogue chemical systems, information is contained in a continuously variable composition of an assembly of molecules rather than in a discrete string of digital bits." DNA is a discrete and limited unit digital code. http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

"METABOLISM-FIRST’ scenarios for the origin of life fall within this analogue framework, positing that early life was based on autocatalytic metabolic cycles that would have been constructed in a manner akin to how analogue computer systems are cabled together to execute a specific problem-solving task." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

ANALOG RATIOS. "The heritable information in this case typically consists of the compositional ratios of the molecules in the organized assemblies." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

ISSUES. "Additionally, in the analogue-first picture there exists a deeper issue of (re)programmability and with the difficulty of maintaining orthogonal (i.e. non-interacting and thus non-interfering) reactions in strictly analogue reaction networks." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

UNIVERSALITY IS DIGITAL. "All known life achieves universality (at least in a limited sense) by using the digital sequence structure of informational polymers. Such universality would be exceedingly difficult to engineer in an analogue-only system given the challenges associated with building reaction networks where each (programmed) reaction is chemically orthogonal to all other reactions." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL SWITCHES. "Orthogonality is, by comparison, relatively easy to achieve with digitized switches. Control is therefore much easier to achieve in an analogue system with digital switches than in a solely analogue system." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

HYBRID SYSTEMS. "It is clear that analogue-only systems are not capable of adaptation in the same way as living systems are. Modern life is a hybrid: digital memory and digital switches enable control over many (non-interfering) analogue states, and therefore enable adaptability to changing environmental conditions with the same basic toolkit." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

AUGMENTED ANALOG SYSTEM. "This is another way of stating, in informational terms, that analogue-only systems are not as versatile or as robust as analogue systems with digital information control and as such may probably have very limited evolutionary capacity." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

HARDWARE PLUS SOFTWARE. "In our view, an explanation of life's origin is fundamentally incomplete in the absence of an account of how the unique causal role played by information in living systems first emerged. In other words, we need to explain the origin of both the hardware and software aspects of life, or the job is only half finished." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

INSUFFICIENT. "Explaining the chemical substrate of life and claiming it as a solution to life's origin is like pointing to silicon and copper as an explanation for the goings-on inside a computer." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn