A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity | Hacker News Reader

A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity

nautil.us

90 pointsdnetesn35 comments

This theory reminds me a lot of the folding funnel. It used to be thought of as a paradox that a protein could fold in mere minutes if it needed to explore each possible configuration before arranging into its "correct" configuration. This paradox was solved with the theory of the folding funnel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding_funnel) which states that the potential energy surface is not flat, but rather it is 3 dimensional funnel with points where it is practically impossible to go backwards. The nascent protein does not explore the entire potential energy surface, instead it just folds into relatively few transition states before assuming its final form.

The wiki page still calls it a hypothesis, but also doesn't seem to have had substantial updates in a decade (where I define "substantial" as "an expert updated the information" - not a critique of the other types of edition that have happened). Is there any more recent material on this? An animated visualisation, perhaps?

I did my undergrad in biophysics and this is basically a simplified version of the currently accepted view. We now also know that some proteins fold in units, and can have multiple stable fold stopping points along the folding paths, and a good deal of proteins never really have a single stable fold at all. Basically google scholar "protein folding energy landscape" for more details. http://m.pnas.org/content/113/12/3159.short

Here's a nice visualization:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Manajit_Hayer-Hartl/pub...

The next step will be the realization that asymmetry of direction towards self organization on all levels, coded as energy consumption/dissipation efficiency, is a built in property of our reality, and life and counsciousness as we understand then are not random accidents.

Quarks -> protons/neutrons, nucleus+electrons -> atoms, atoms -> molecules, molecules -> proteins, proteins -> cells, cells -> organisms, organisms -> ecosystems, stars -> galaxies, galaxies -> clusters, etc.

There seems to be more of a bell curve of complexity as you move through the powers of ten... Galaxies have some general organizational properties at the very large scale, as do atoms etc at the very small end, but directly in the middle of those extremes lie us, the alchemical pinnacle of self organisation until proven otherwise.

This just struck me. As something is becoming organized, something else is becoming disorganized or even failing to exit. We seem to recognize and study the one, but ignore the other. But perhaps there's something to be gleaned from taking the perspective of what's gone, not what is now?

Not new.

Seems like a repost. Also: "This article was originally published in our “Adaptation” issue in March, 2016." Someone is really pushing this guy's scientific (or literary) branding.

March 2016 is pretty new, and I am happy for the repost because I didn't see it the first time and it is a very interesting idea.

Quite a few publications re-post older articles, and I vaguely recall Aeon doing so in the past (not 100%).

That said, usually they're a bit older than a year or so.

Yep. Some of the headlines are particularly egregious. https://www.bing.com/news/search?q=%22jeremy+england%22&qs=n...

I suspect he is up for tenure review :P His proposals are not knew just spun differently. You can find critics from other physics/chemist regarding their suspicions as well.

> His proposals are not knew just spun differently. You can find critics from other physics/chemist regarding their suspicions as well.

I have a rule that people shouldn't post negative comments without including specific arguments and/or links. You just violated that rule.

Very interesting! I wonder that if they are expecting to use dissipative mechanisms in small system how would they be able to control thermal noise and reproducibility of the calculations?

>“Red,” for instance, is a translation of the phrase “620-750 nanometer wavelength.”

only sometimes.

Do you mean only sometimes, as in only when talking about electromagnetic waves? Or something else?

It can also mean a sum of wavelengths outside of that range whose average is in the range.

And the temperature example is even worse. Our subjective experience of temperature is only kind of correlated with what physicists call temperature.

Heard this before.

What do y'all think of this twist on "atheism vs intelligent design" debate? A wild swing from "life is improbable" to "life is almost certain".

I think there's some major flaw in this reasoning. Otherwise, how do you explain Drake's equation? How come every planet we have seen so far doesn't have any form of complex life on it so far as we know?

Here's what I think the flaw is: the more a planet heats up, the more it can radiate into space as infrared radiation. Obviously an equilibrium can be achieved without a constant increase in complexity.

I don't think we have enough data to be sceptical about the presence of certainty of life on other planets. We've only found ~3,700 planets other than Earth - and only ~20 of those are near the size of Earth[0]. We couldn't even see those planets directly until very recently, so it doesn't seem certain (to me, a layman) that we could even identify Earth as having life, at the same resolutions. That's assuming that we would recognize life, if we saw it. (Side note: Children of Men is a book I recently read that touches on this topic. ) I'll admit that I am very optimistic about the presence of advanced life on planets other than Earth, so this is definitely influencing my outlook.

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/science/2016/05...

But we have explored Mars and the moon!

Not really, not at the level necessary to rule out the existence of life. Both Jupiter and Saturn have moons that may have life based on our current understanding of life and its origins. And Mars may still have life that we haven't found yet. The truth is that we are just now able to start seriously asking the question: is there life elsewhere in the universe? It may take a few hundred years to answer that question.

Perhaps in the way a holidaymaker considers themselves aware of other cultures! For real exploration we have to be living there. This is just because it focuses our attention, allows large numbers of people to be aware of their surroundings in a non-theoretical way.

Once you live there, you can fool yourself that you found microbes when in fact you spread them!

That's why everything is decontaminated before blasting off to Mars :)

We've only gone a couple of inches below the surface. Mars could have microbes hiding a kilometer down and it's hard to know if we would be able to tell.

But, what does life have to do with an earth like planet? And when you study the history of the earth you come to realize that life as we know it today is the result of countless events, some of them catastrophic.

As I understand it, if you simply shifted the location of Antarctica, that would change ocean currents, this effect weather, and so one. Life as we know it today might not exist if it weren't for Antarctica.

And the fact is, we'd be toast, literally, without a magnetic field. That's more important that planet size. How many planets have we found with a magnetic field like ours? What are THOSE odds?

So it seems to me, an earth like planet (in size) is a cute exercise but in the end close to irrelevant.

Our life planet data set is an N=1 so we are searching what we know. It is certainly possible life is found on non-Earth-like planets and isn't carbon-based, however we don't have any examples so we don't know what to look for. The initial search is focusing on Earth-like planets because we know the signs of life in that case.

As for Antarctica, that may true but there would still be life, maybe not humans, on Earth. The fossil record shows there was life before Antarctica existed.

Literally billions of years older, in fact...

Life is much, much older than Antarctica. It's only about 25 million years old (per Wikipedia). Humans might not exist but life would be pretty much the same without it, insofar as there would be large critters and plants wandering about and eating each other.

Allow me to clarify. Life is a function of the broader ecosystem. Antarctica was an example of some we take for granted, but it has/has had an impact on the Earth's temps, weather, etc.

My broader point was that humans today have a fair number of random events to thank for having led to the human species. So it's not only a question of life (in the broader abstract) but also planet history.

Planets similar to earth? Probably countless. Those with a similar history is, I presume, significantly rare. Perhaps zero?

We started looking for planets that were in the life-supporting temperature range from their star, and have only recently begun looking at Earth-sized planets. There is an upper range to the gravity that we expect larger life to be able to form at, which means we have to limit the search somehow, to make a meaningful search.

Ok. But a large less dense planet could have a similar mass to earth, and thus a similar gravity. Size really isn't the key KPI. Correct?

p.s. I understand the we have to start somewhere. Agreed. I was questioning, out loud, if we are perhaps asking the wrong question. That's all :)

What I am curious about is non carbon based lifeforms.

>Here's what I think the flaw is: the more a planet heats up, the more it can radiate into space as infrared radiation.

What do you mean by that? The planet radiates exactly as much heat out as it absorbs from incoming starlight.

The only thing that change this parameter is the planet's albedo. Darker planets radiate away more heat because they absorb more heat. Even radiant forcing (from CO2 et al) doesn't change the equilibrium amount of infrared radiation escaping, just the surface temperature required to achieve radiant balance.

Note that increasing the surface temperature reduces the amount of thermodynamically useful energy (exergy) available to the biosphere, because it's like increasing the heatsink temperature of a Carnot engine.

Here's a better article without the theological nonsense: https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o...

Never ceases to amaze me how some scientists can embrace a bunch of 2000+ year old nonsense.

That's a really good article.

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