4 ms·
>a small, but persistent, chiral bias >If this mechanism dominates, then the handedness of living systems should be universal. No matter how large the bias (u
by prvc 6y ago
>a small, but persistent, chiral bias
>If this mechanism dominates, then the handedness of living systems should be universal.
No matter how large the bias (unless it's "astronomically" close to 1), there will be, by the law of large numbers, some world populated by life of the opposite chirality to the favoured one, due to it arriving first there, given the size of the universe.
- 6nf 6y agoYup I don't think the author meant that all life in the entire universe must be the same chirality, just that the bias would be widespread across the universe
- ramshorns 6y agoYeah, it'd be interesting to see what the last graph (Figure B4) looks like if you start with mostly evil molecules rather than a racemic mixture. Maybe the bias still flips it to all live molecules after some time, but maybe it takes so long that by then somebody's gotten good at replicating the evil molecules and they end up winning.