3 ms·
Right, but those amino acid chains are rich with self-interactions because the subunits each have so many different elements within them, like those big cheater
by at_a_remove 4y ago
Right, but those amino acid chains are rich with self-interactions because the subunits each have so many different elements within them, like those big cheaters carbon and nitrogen. You can get all kinds of exciting stuff with that.
Were they only chains of sulfurs, could we get much out of it? Knots, possibly, I could make room for a knot in the chain of sulfur leading to something interesting, or a vague Van der Waals or other second, even third-order effect, but it's really on the knife edge of possibility.
- monkeycantype 4y agohello remove, Of course your right, but what if absolute efficiency doesn't matter all, what if the only thing that matters is relative efficiency? If knots and folds of two bonded atoms could create units with different properties : hydrophobic, and hydrophilic (or the equivalent properties to some other non aquatic medium), forming corkscrews, forming sheets, forming cross chain links - then perhaps it doesn't matter how convoluted the solutions are, perhaps all that matters is whether it is relatively efficient compared to other competing solutions. What I think makes this more than just a hypothetical to ponder is that perhaps this is fundamental to understanding the origins of life. Perhaps early life was complex without being sophisticated, having terribly inefficient metabolic pathways, a chaos of reactions in which only a bare sliver of energy was directed towards useful activities, perhaps the activities of those early cells unfolded slowly over thousands of years and it didn't matter because there was no other life to compete with.