3 ms·

I'm just painting broad strokes, trying to avoid the TL;DR threshold. But re energy gradients, I'm talking about the difference between being able to tap into

I'm just painting broad strokes, trying to avoid the TL;DR threshold. But re energy gradients, I'm talking about the difference between being able to tap into potential energy in the environment, vs just seeking some kind of equilibrium. Sure, a freshly crafted sequence of amino acids will find a shape to minimize the internal energy, and so you can say there's a gradient there, but that's different from taking in H2S and CO2 (or what have you) from the environment and reacting them to liberate non-thermal energy that can be used to get things done.

Ultimatt 4y ago
greenbit so in your mind what is a viroid? We have examples that are extant of RNA doing this. Sure its exploiting an established RNA system, but the point still stands as there's absolutely no reason you couldn't have viroids dealing with other catalytic networks making RNA. That's sort of the point, at some point everything was wandering viroids among autocatalytic networks with varying survival rates. That gets you selective pressure. Thats the transition you're talking about, from autocatalytic localised chemistry into RNA. The initial fitness benefit of RNA is that for one class of molecule you can have a lot of complex catalytic chemistry AND they have the ability through base pairing to catalyse their own exact replication.