"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> > Yes, there is some 'evidence'. We actually got it as an exercise in a
> > lovely little course on noise and randomness in biology to derive a
> > likely 2 base pair code. It turns out that the third base pair is not
> > as significant as the first two, and for most amino acids it is
> > redundant. When you move beyond the primordial soup and don't want to
> > share your survival tricks with everything in the vicinity, then a
> > less error-prone transcription starts to make sense.
>
> ??
>
> "Don't want to share your survival tricks with everything in the
> vicinity"?
Sorry, I was a bit obscure there. This was just some personal
theorizing out the universal ancestor which got into my answer.
What I was getting at was that the earliest replicators were probably
quite happy if they managed to replicate, never mind fidelity. The
mutation rate was very high, making species more like viral
quasi-species with very fuzzy borders. Horizontal gene transfer was
likely extremely high, and Carl Woese has suggested that there was a
single kind of universal ancestor. Essentially everything was the same
diffuse species, where every cell exchanged genetic material rather
promiscously with the others. In this mess the three base pair code,
ribosomes, protein based phenotype and lipid membranes developed. Once
the "infrastructure" surrounding the genes became good enough, various
kingdoms crystailsed from the universal ancestors by no longer sharing
genes freely.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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