Cosmic Rays May Explain Life’s Bias for Right-Handed DNA
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
See pages 65-67 of the below (pdf pages, not book pages).
http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-electron.p...
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/force-of-nature-gave-life-its-as...
> Thiotimoline is a fictitious chemical compound conceived by American biochemist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov. It was first described in a spoof scientific paper titled "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" in 1948. The major peculiarity of the chemical is its "endochronicity": it starts dissolving before it makes contact with water.
> Asimov went on to write three additional short stories, each describing different properties or uses of thiotimoline.
They need to prove that increasing number of mutations is even a desirable property.
Faster evolution is a desirable property, maybe not anymore, but in first life for sure.
Maintaining an exact copy of RNA/DNA through generations and generations is a real challenge, right? Loosening up the copying mechanisms to allow for more mistakes would probably be quite easy to achieve, if that was beneficial, right?
I’d be interested to hear what makes the idea wrong.
I assume that making perfect replicas is the default way for a given type of life to dominate. Making “random copies” (an oxymoron) is not likely to result in domination of any individual type (of building block, single cell, or multi-cellular life). Making perfect copies allows a build-up of “winners”.
If that implies a very strong selection process for perfect copies, then after that a selection process for increased (but still small in aggregate) mutation rate would seem globally helpful.
The answer is that there was an old fish with 5 whatever in it's fins, and the offspring conquered the land and evolved and now we have 5 fingers. If a 4 whatever fish tries to do the same trick, it will face a strong competition an if the offspring ever reach the technological level to create a small country, we would nuke them from orbit.
See original paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12138.pdf
And previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23294294
Tangentially: I was told once the reason spiral staircases go the other way (in castles usually) is that when running upstairs with a sword you want to be able to use your right hand to kill anyone coming down the stairs.
As a side note you do turn left in the UK roads, so this rule is not universal.
How weird to call that "right-handedness"!
I was just (jokingly) pointing out how introducing conventions for right or left requires memorization of some silly rule like this. I'd much prefer if they used made-for-purpose topological terms instead of pretending how this somehow relates to a widely known concept.
Now do the same with your left hand and the orange DNA helices. When your left thumb points along the helix, your left fingers curl in the direction the helix turns, so the orange helices are left-handed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(electromagnetism)#H...
as context in which the left or right forms might not actually be equivalent.
The reason I think this is genius, is it is a question anyone could have asked. Lots of us have probably thought about it at some point and summarily concluded it was not a question we were capable of exploring.