Hacker News Reader

Plenty of mutations are already produced by faulty copying. This is how viruses mutate. An early organism would have very error-prone RNA copying. How would the cosmic rays, producing a tiny effect on top of this, be relevant at all? The author fails to explain this. The secret to chirality might simply be chance: once the machinery is running it can only understand its own chirality.

View on HN

I believe the original paper’s authors are suggesting that the effect of cosmic rays on mutations might be enantioselective (meaning they effect molecules differently based on their chirality).

See original paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.12138.pdf

And previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23294294

They do address this. Faulty copying is not biased (except towards mutations which help decrease it). DNA chirality is. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, that tiny bias adds up to a significantly more successful organism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com