Has there been life for 1/4 of the age of the Universe?

Ringo, re: I never said that. Show me the post.My career in science started in 1960. I have had a good look it. I can't find a single principle in biology, chemistry, or physics that helps me understand how life crawled out of that magnanimous goo, wherever it may have puddled up . Around 1976 I first got excited about Prigogine's dissipative structures”"order out of chaos" and all of that. Maybe he's got the abiogenic answers, I thought; Lyapounov's function looked pretty ripe to me. Information theory and ecological ascendency also had a grip on me; still does, but I can't take them to the bank. Fullerenes and Penrose's microtubules...nope, no answers there. All those quasi-mechanical Tinker Toys were not enough to build even a convincing proto-prototype of life. But then there are those airy genes with their penchant for jumping around in space and time. Barbara Mcclintock first caught them jumping in 1942; and a decade later DNA was discovered. Selfish genes, cooperative genes, healing genes, killer genes”now those are interesting! Still, I remain dead in water when it comes down to explaining abiogenesis. If you are not so perplexed and have some abiogenic principles to reveal, then I'm your ready reader. Please show me your cards and tell why they trump my hand.”Hoot Mon

Ringo, re: Boy, that's a relief! Because we do indeed know a great deal about chemistry. Now, with regards to abiogenic principles, could you bother to mention a few? I'm most inetersted in the homological ones”you know, the ones that taught DNA molecules how to communicate from one generation to the next using a coded language of three-letter words with a 4^3 geometry that neatly comprises a genetic dictionary. That was amighty slick trick for chemicals!”Hoot Mon

Ringo, re: You are not going to succeed with the geneticists with an attitude like that, and they have something important to say. They freely speak of a
genetic language and look for ways to write new scripts and make changes in genes and alleles. But I know you're a stickler about words, like "probably" vs. "maybe" vs. "perhaps." What about this "bump and grind" business? Should I not likewise challenge the clattering metaphores of your mechanics? And what makes you say that chemistry is mechanical, anyway? I thought it was chemical. Oh well, just words and metaphors.”Hoot Mon

Woodsy, re: Demonstration please. It it were this simple then life would be just an gadget and abiogensis would be a self-starting manufacturing "process that can look after itself." Could you be more specific with "the right start"? How about "the right stuff"?”Hoot Mon

Woodsy, re: I agree with all you say here. I'm just hooting over the fact that scientists don't yet know the origin of those "self-replicating molecules" (which happen to hold the genes). It seems obvious to me that they were not here when Earth accreted. Those molecules and their precious messages came about a billion years later. Something that we fail to grasp allowed them to get a foothold. Was it chemical? (The chemists seem to thing so.) I badly want to know what that is, or was, and I'll put up with any kind of ridicule to get there.”Hoot Mon

Ringo asks: I am probably vastly inferior to you on a scale of chemistry acuity (but I'm ready to go one-on-one with you and your molecules over a beer or two sometime.) And, yes, the Grimm Brothers and the woo-woos are helpful and comforting to me, especially now when the chemists can't explain those chemical bump and grinds of abiogenesis.”Hoot Mon

AZPaul3, you wrote: I'm hoping for an eternity of digital Martinis and virtual shuffleboard...where chickens don't have to be fried and ice cream never melts. Thanks. I'll be going over to Conway's site soon to check it out. (Too bad Ringo didn't take the bait.) Oh, yes!”Hoot Mon

Ringo, re: Wow! That's wet and heavy! Enough with the excuses! I want those principles, and I want them now!”Hoot Mon

Ringo wrote, regarding the chemists' search for principles of abiogeneis: So, bravely, I’ll make a stab at answering my own challenge to specify the physicochemical principles of abiogenesis. I have to agree with Ringo that whatever happened to originate life (either on Earth or elsewhere) certainly must have involved chemistry and thermodynamics, and very possibly nothing more than that. My issue has been that those kinds of principles alone do not provide the answers I’m looking for”genes don’t have thermodynamic principles because they are merely digital information. But then I’m forced back to what I learned in P-Chem and Biophysics, namely those remarkable principles of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the maximization of order.Indeed more complex arrangements of chemicals can come about as the comprising system advances into non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Prigigone’s dissipative structures have been clearly modeled and demonstrated. Before that, Harold Morowitz et al. added much to what Schrdinger had said earlier about energy flow in biological life. Morowitz (1968, Energy Flow In Biology) writes lucidly about the ordering function L as a biosystem advances toward non-equilibrium (A ) at some kinetic temerature (T’):L = A(T’)/kT’,where k is Boltzmann’s constant. For this relationship Morowitz specifies four properties:1. It has a zero value for equilibrium systems.2. It associates order with distance from equilibrium.3. It is dimensionless.4. It can be represented using probability theory and information theory.Now, Morowitz shows that L’ (L multiplied by Planck’s constant h) represents a ratio of energy to rate:L’ = A/(kT/h).He goes on to argue that this ordering principle applies to chain-extending bonds in carbon chemistry: “The existence of chain-extending bonds increases L for another reason. The function has a S (change of entropy) as well as a U (change in internal energy) part, and the S is, in general, lowered by chain formation leading to a positive value of -TS and an increase in L. In ordinary biological systems, order as thermodynamically defined corresponds to macromolecular complexity.”Without knowing much about the chemical conditions attending abiogenesis, we might already have physicochemical principles that favor the storage of linear information on macromolecules (i.e., genes). So there are well-reason principles concerning chemical bonding that seem to support the incipient ordering of nucleotides on DNA that eventually lock in as digital instructions for mechanical operations. The only thing these principles don’t explain to me is how such a maximization of ordered nucleotides can result in a non-stereochemical "language" (at least from a geneticist's woo-woo POV).”Hoot Mon

Ringo, re: I'm good with what you say here, but only up to a point. If you will forgive my woo-woo-ness, I am troubled over how a language arises on thermodynamic principles. I know you will object to that, and that's OK. If genes communicated their information on a purely stereochemical basis I'd be tight with your POV. The fact is they don't. This is a strange trick of nature, when you think about how such a language came out of a soup that had only heat and chemicals in it.”Hoot Mon

Ringo says: OK, whatever.I think stereochemistry is a FACT, don't you? I agree with you that life IS in the molecules. I also agree that molecular dynamics is a steroechemical affair”Tinker Toys and all”and that chemists know a great deal about the mechanical aspects of stereochemical bonding. But wait...one thing that is clear to all molecular biologists is that the Central Dogma (Crick's) prohibits proteins from communicating back to the genes precisely because there are no stereochemical pathways for that information to travel. J. D. Watson's Molecular Biology of the Gene, for straters, is loaded with the FACTS you choose to ignor. Or maybe you think Watson and Crick were just dabbling in the woo-woos.”Hoot Mon

AZPaul3, you wrote: I do agree. NS, combned with genetic drift, gene flow, and preferential mating would seem to be enough to establish feedback into a genome. The point I would emphasize is that this kind of feedback doesn't travel deterministically through stereochemical pathways, but instead stochastically through homological pathways in a population.”Hoot Mon

AZPaul3, you wrote: I've been over to Conway's Game of Life site, trying out a few of your configurations. Very interesting! While playing around with a few minimal configurations I ran accross this one:1. Clear field.2. Set field to"medium" pixel display.3. Make two neighboring 3x3 pixel Thingies, separated by one pixel column, and leave the center pixel of each Thingy empty (depicting minimal "cellular" structure).4. Start 'er up.5. When those little Thingies mate they evolve into numerous monster Thingies with relatively more complex structures before they finally go extinct on the 54th generation.I wish I knew if this has any meaning at all where biological evolution is concerned. The most I can make of it is that Nature, even in her "virtual reality," allows self-organization and evolutuion to occur.”Hoot Mon

This is a nice summary of "jump-starting a cellular world: Investigating the origin of life, from soup to networks": This conjures up Thomas Gold's "Deep Hot Biosphere", which I happen to appreciate.”Hoot Mon