If we truly didn't know how computers came about, it's certainly progress to figure out the silicon can come from sand.
How is it not origins of life research to attack every step in the process?
How is it not origins of life research to attack every step in the process?
If a student asked "how did life originate?" a response about about nucleic acid synthesis would be a bit disingenuous, because that covers only very, very tiny fraction of the surface area of the problem. The more honest answer would be that there are so many large gaps in our knowledge that we truly don't know.
To be clear, I'm not trying to cast skepticism on the whole of biology. There are other questions that we have much better answers to, like the evolutionary pathway from single cellular life to multicellular life. Or the evolutionary link between humans and great apes. But abiogenesis is not one of those questions.
Are the gaps really that large? We know that some configurations of nucleotids are enough to create a full metabolism, we know that they arrange at random, and we know how most of them appeared.
Except for the few nucleotides that we don't know how they existed, we do know that if you have enough of them on enough places, some kind of life will appear. So looks like the open question here is how those molecules appeared.
It's theorized that under the right conditions amino acids will bond to become proteins without needing the mediation of a ribosome. So it's certainly possible that with enough primordial soup you could get proteins. But that doesn't explain how the nucleotide string ends up getting treated as a reusable blueprint for proteins.
That seems like a pretty big gap.
Also, people have created RNA-only self replicating mechanisms that could quite well appear at random, with extremely low odds. Life probably comes from some structure with higher odds that we don't know about, but that's not a huge gap.
iirc the idea centered around the tRNA "code" having a pattern to it - one shaped by its binding affinity to part of the sequence that codes for the tRNA-aminoacyltransferase enzyme itself. I wish I remembered enough to find the reference.
edit: ah! think I remembered. the hypothesis was that the codon sequence had some sort of binding affinity to the amino acid it codes for. that there's a relationship between them, suggesting a world where codons attracted amino acids to bind to them without an enzyme linking them.
As the article title does not say or imply that the answer to this question has been found, let alone that it will be revealed in the article, this is at least beside the point.
In attempting to brush aside gliptic's pertinent question, you have switched to a general (and somewhat subjective) claim that does not seem to hold up in this specific case.
That, imo, is far more important.
We already had adding machines and the philosophy necessary for digital logic.
It may well be the case with the original system that initiated the process we call life. RNA (and by extension DNA) may have been a complete afterthought.
I'm always disappointed when I see this research outside of a systems context. Like, sure we can show these things happen, but show me a thermodynamic systems, in place,where this can happen.
In you metaphor about sand and beaches, this may be like taking some one to a dune field and saying 'see all this sand. That's where computers come from'.