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Did there have to be any eating? Imagine a simple chemical chain reaction, where RNA is floating around in the "primordial soup", and self-replicates simply wh
by sliverstorm 10y ago
Did there have to be any eating?
Imagine a simple chemical chain reaction, where RNA is floating around in the "primordial soup", and self-replicates simply when it encounters the molecules needed to do so.
RNA is just a chemical, you don't need a whole organism for it to float around and react with other chemicals.
Of course, maybe these two things happened at the same time. Maybe mitochondria developed as the dumb metabolic engine, while RNA developed into the structure. Eventually the structure captures metabolic engines to fuel it directly, rather than harvesting free chemical energy from the environment.
- Someone 10y ago"Did there have to be any eating?" Define "eating". "and self-replicates simply when it encounters the molecules needed to do so." It self-replicates, destroying those molecules. One could call that "eating", and probably should, as, if one calls this self-replication, there's an underlying assumption that there is life.