quote:
And how is that information processed? Is there any chemistry involved in a synapse?
Synapses? As in neuronal connections? What do they have to do with the origin of life? Or are you a closet IDist? :-)
Information in the biological sense I was using involves symbol sequences, such as base sequences in nucleic acids. These symbol sequences serve as an informational template for the production of "offspring" (and in cellular life, for the production of cellular constituents). It is not just the chemistry of the monomers that conveys the information; the sequence of the monomers is of paramount importance. This can be likened to the English language where individual letters are analogous to individual monomers. It is not that an individual letter of the alphabet carries inherent meaning, but a group of them arranged in a specific sequence does. For example, if I took all of the letters in this sentence or post and scrambled them up, the information (both syntactic and semantic) would be lost, even though the same "monomers" would be present in the same quantities.
No experiment to date has demonstrated that undirected, non-biological chemistry alone can generate biological information of the kind needed for a "simple" RNA self-replicator. There is more to life than just chemistry; there is also information processing.
[This message has been edited by DNAunion, 11-29-2003]
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