4 ms·
This argument depends on whether there is a 'natural' biochemical scaffolding for life that resembles what we have on Earth. There's no reason in principle that
by idlewords 4y ago
This argument depends on whether there is a 'natural' biochemical scaffolding for life that resembles what we have on Earth. There's no reason in principle that a totally different biochemistry that made use of racemic mixtures couldn't work, but here we run into the wall of being unable to imagine forms of life substantially from our own. It's very easy to get into a loop of circular reasoning when answering questions like why life on Earth has a preferred handedness.
- lumost 4y agoIs this question substantially different from “why don’t animals have four legs and 2 hands?” It strikes me that there could have been dozens of “genesis” events early in earth’s history which evolution aligned into a few winning blueprints.
- Garlef 4y ago> This argument depends on whether there is a 'natural' biochemical scaffolding for life that resembles what we have on Earth. I don't think the argument hinges on a notion of 'naturality'. Instead it seems to be more of an statistical/occams razor kind of argument: Mixed chiralities would introduce a lot of incompatabilities among the building blocks, making the emergence of a stable form/process more unlikely. And also the argument (as far as I understand it) is in no contradiction to your caveat: Of course, a stable form/process might have emerged with mixed chirality. But it did not and was never very likely to begin with. [Note: This is not a statement about assigning truth values to these arguments but rather I hope it clearifies the argument itself.]
- idlewords 4y agoWhat I'm saying is that the statistical argument already bakes in assumptions, since we don't know anything about the underlying distribution.