Addy Pross
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Addy Pross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So a very, very simple template mechanism, just like, you know, you can make, if you've got a rubber stamp, you can make copies of what's on that stamp just by stamping bits of paper many times. So that was a dramatic discovery. And it came about just a little after the discovery of DNA as the very important molecule of life. as I hope we'll get to as we proceed.
It's been made to be more important than it really is, but we'll come back to that in a moment. Well, in several moments. So... But the problem was once replicating molecules were allowed to replicate like RNA, something dramatic happened, which was very exciting. The replication process showed that the molecule could evolve. In other words,
The replication didn't always come about perfectly, but there was a mutation. A slightly different replicating molecule was formed by mistake. The replication didn't work perfectly. And therefore, there was a process of evolution. Now, this was very exciting. So you start off with a replicating molecule. It makes copies of itself, and it evolves.
And the feeling was, wow, we've discovered the origin of life, the beginning of evolution, except there was one problem. When it evolved, it didn't evolve towards something that was living. All that happened was the replicating molecule became shorter and shorter and shorter. It started out with something like 5,000 segments and ended up with something like 500 segments.
And the reason was very simple. The 500-segment molecule replicated faster than the longer molecule. So the shorter molecule out-replicated the longer one. But that was going from complexity to simplicity as opposed to the other way, which is what we want. And that's been holding up that way of thinking about life, well, for 50, 60 years. So that hasn't been the way to get there.
There was the metabolism idea that you get the organization coming about first. But already quite a few years ago, a physical chemist in Israel, Schneer Lifson, said there's a problem with the metabolism first idea. And the problem is you're asking people. disorganized matter to become organized. Now, the second law doesn't like that. The second law likes organized matter to become disorganized.
So you can't start off life with a counter thermodynamic process and that in a sense has run out into difficulties because of that simple issue. What this new dynamic kinetic state idea does is to overcome the metabolism problem, the fact that you're organizing, because if you get energy coming in, the rules change. I like to say that the rules governing balls rolling down a hill are
are different to the rules governing cars driving along a road and up a hill. Different rules. So once nature spontaneously, in some way, managed to form a dynamic, kinetically stable system, an important step towards the creation of life came about. But we need one more element for that to happen. And this is where we're struggling experimentally.
The DKS system that you make has to be replicative in order to undergo change so that it will become more, I was about to say stable, but more persistent, stable in the kinetic sense. And that, we've only started working with these sorts of systems, so to make a system that is both DKS stable and replicative, we're not there yet.
My comment here is the guy that figures that out, there's a Nobel Prize waiting for him.
Look – All I can say, it's early days. One group in Holland has been trying to work on that. But it's... I'm a theoretician, so I run away from experimental problems. So I can't deal with – can't make experimental suggestions as to how that might be done. But all I'm saying is we at least have an outline, a direction to think about in order to somehow create –
a system that could, once it replicates, it can evolve. And let me say here clearly, once it evolves, it will evolve in a direction that complexifies, that leads to not simplicity, but to complexity, because just as the second law is quantitative, there is a tiny quantitative element to the DKS system as well.
When you do the differential equation that describes the formation of a system in the decay state, it's just the predator, the classic predator-prey equation, formation and decay. But once you have two... DKS systems competing for the same resource, the math says quite explicitly that the more stable, the more persistent one will drive the less persistent one into extinction.
In other words, once you have a mutation in the DKS system, it will drive, it will be encouraged, and it'll push away. It, if you like, saps the water out of the other fountain, so the other fountain just collapses. And what will it do? it will take on characteristics that enable it to deal better with its environment.
So here is the beginning of memory, because the fact that it changes in a way that makes it more stable, that greater stability is not inherent to the system. It's environmentally dependent. It's stable for that particular environment. Just like, you know... A tiger might be stable in Africa, but if you put him in Alaska on an iceberg, it's not doing too well.
The thing that has to be stated is that that will only happen for a limited period of time as long as energy is available. Once the energy stops, everything stops. Now, look, the fact that we build houses, we build lots of things, that's all counter thermodynamic because we're utilizing energy in order to bring about these systems that are counter thermodynamic.
But we can only do that as long as energy is available. And most of the energy that enables life to proceed and develop on Earth is solar energy. Once the solar energy stops, and that will happen eventually, then all life will, just like if you stop pumping water into your fountain, the fountain will die and all of life in that same way will die.
It'll collapse because you don't have the source of energy. So there'll be no life when we get to that state you physicists love to talk about, heat death. It's not going to be fun there. We won't have any No pleasure in being in heat, dear.
I have to say that my understanding from the work of people in the field that making these DKS chemical systems is not easy. And that has to be worked on more as well. And I can't comment too much on that because... I'm the guy that doesn't dare go into the lab. So I can't say much on that. But just to say that it is being done, but the systems that arise have an extraordinary –
Dynamic capability, flexibility, because as I say, the fact that for every thermodynamic state there are thousands of kinetic states means that once there's a driving force for change, and there is one, and we'll talk about that in a moment maybe because it's very important, Because biologists tend to think of evolution as without direction. That is not true. Evolution definitely has a direction.
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