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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

This is a very computer science and not scientific response, but I look at the Game of Life, and it makes me realize that little patterns naturally form everywhere. Biology is just a little pattern that wants to replicate and survive and that doesn't have to mean intelligently.

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> Biology is just a little pattern that wants to replicate and survive

I don't really see biology as being a "little" pattern. To me, looking at the jump from replicating molecules in chemical soup to single cell organisms is like looking at the jump from an abacus to an Intel i9 processor.

> the jump from an abacus to an Intel i9 processor

Call it 75 years (1942 - before electronic computers to 2017 - first i9) which is about 39M minutes. Assume human innovation can work on an minutely cycle[0] and you've got 39M iterations from "no electronic computers" to "Intel i9".

I'd put decent money on there bring several orders of magnitude more chemical reactions than that per second in the primordial soup (good conditions for fast reactions and there was A LOT of it.) And it had about half a billion years (fifteen quadrillion, seven hundred seventy-eight trillion, eight hundred billion seconds) to cook before things really started happening.

Statistically, it was likely.

[0] Obviously optimistic but giving parallelism a chance.

I would guess that abiogenesis is often framed around randomness as a strategy to argue for its implausibility. Of course, a completely random system is unlikely to produce enough coherence to convince anyone that it could be possible.

But in reality, the universe is full of patterns. The laws of physics are not random. Water behaves in very specific ways. Our planet revolves around the Sun in 365 day intervals. The planet rotates every 24 hours. Even out of these two interlocking patterns, you can see how energy delivery to the surface of the planet could result in mechanical and chemical cycles that may result in non-random mineral formation, concentration gradients, and thermal dynamics.

Scientists argue that abiogenesis is a result of inherently chaotic but non-random processes, not a hypothetical probabilistic scenario like monkeys with typewriters.

Who said you had to junp to single celled organisms first? One of the oldest displays at a science museum I remember was very simple. It was basically a rubber sheet attached to the top of a spinning pole resmebling a folded umbrella without the spines. There was a adjustable knob you could play with to adjust the speed that it spun. It would start from zero. Versus interestingly to me, the exhibit demonstrated that at certain speeds the dangling edge of the rubber sheet would form nice sine waves at certain speeds. It might be chaotic at first but eventually, given just the right amount of energy to spin, the wave would appear. If you sped it up or slowed it down, sometimes the wave would collapse, but if you hit another natural frequency, it would eventually snap into a larger or smaller amplitude with a greater or lesser amplitude. My take away was that if there is enough energy and repetition to almost anything, eventually patterns will arise. And if you let them do that long enough, then even in imperfect environments, relatively stable outcomes would occur. Much like life in my opinion. Have enough chemicals and energy thrashing around long enough in a cycle, and enough adverse selection against all those structures, eventually some structures will emerge and self-reinforce. Doesn't gotta start with cells, just molecules.

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