Month: September 2022

NUMBING NUMBERS. "If we consider now that a sequence made up of 100 monomers was needed for a ribozyme to have the wide range of activity allowing the polymerization of the four ribonucleotides, the probability of one single sequence would be reduced to 0.6×10(–60) and synthesizing all of them in one molecular unit over 1 billion years would lead to the synthesis of a mass of nucleic acid representing several tens that of the Earth per day." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

HYPOTHETICAL OPTIONS. "Either Monod was right, life emerged as a consequence of an event that had almost no chance to occur during the lifetime of the universe, or the emergence of life is not a mere question of the probability of a single event, but a driving force exists—and can thus be discovered—to drive this process through its various stages." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

GRADIENT OF LIFE. "The hypothesis that the origin of life may have proceeded stepwise through states of partial ‘aliveness’, which is the obvious consequence of a scientific view that a sharp transition is not physically realizable because of its improbability, is therefore sufficient to outline the nature of the process leading to life as we know it, one grounded solely on established laws of physics and chemistry." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

NO BRIGHT LINE. "Some kind of selection was needed in the chemical world before the emergence of evolution so that ‘it is meaningless to draw a strict line between the two worlds’." https://lnkd.in/dS2NY3q View in LinkedIn

THE GREATEST ACCIDENT. " How did life begin? I (and most scientists) would answer, “By accident.” But what an absolutely unlikely accident it must have been!" (George M Whitesides). https://lnkd.in/dv77eVE View in LinkedIn

ABUNDANT LIFE FORMS. "We are surrounded by uncountable varieties of life, especially by multitudes of different types of living cells; we thus have many examples of different forms of life." https://lnkd.in/dv77eVE View in LinkedIn

VERY REMARKABLE. "How remarkable is life? The answer is: very. Those of us who deal in networks of chemical reactions know of nothing like it." (George M Whitesides). https://lnkd.in/dbsPXy3 View in LinkedIn

INSCRUTABLE. "So, at least for now, the cell is beyond our ability to understand it." https://lnkd.in/dv77eVE View in LinkedIn

THE BIG ONE. "How could a chemical sludge spontaneously become a rose, even with billions of years to try?" https://lnkd.in/dv77eVE View in LinkedIn

ANALYSIS PARALYSIS. "The scientific method can be paralyzed by problems that require understanding the very improbable occurrences that result from very, very large numbers of throws of the dice." https://lnkd.in/dv77eVE View in LinkedIn