Life’s Late Digital Revolution and Why It Matters for the Study of the Origins of Life
Open accessAbstract
The information contained in life exists in two forms, analog and digital. Analog information is manifest mainly in the differing concentrations of chemicals that get passed from generation to generation and can vary from cell to cell. Digital information is encoded in linear polymers such as DNA and RNA, whose side chains come in discrete chemical forms. Here, we argue that the analog form of information preceded the digital. Acceptance of this dichotomy, and this progression, can help direct future studies on how life originated and initially complexified on the primordial Earth, as well as expected trajectories for other, independent origins of complex life.
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Recognizing two sequential events-first the origin of an analog chemical system capable of adaptive evolution and then a digital revolution-makes the origin of life problem much more tractable.
“Recognizing that there are two sequential events, first the origin of an analog chemical system that is capable of adaptive evolution and then a digital revolution, the origin of life problem becomes much more tractable [124].”
From The Origin of Prebiotic Information System in the Peptide/RNA World: A Simulation Model of the Evolution of Translation and the Genetic Code (2019) · cites this paper as [124]
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Sorted by citations
Chatterjee, S., & Yadav, S. (2019) · Life · doi:10.3390/life9010025 · Cited by 80 · see citing works
“Recognizing that there are two sequential events, first the origin of an analog chemical system capable of adaptive evolution and then a digital revolution, the origin of life problem becomes much more tractable [118].”
Background
- Authors
- Baum, D., & Lehman, N.
- Affiliations
- University of Wisconsin–Madison (US)
- Portland State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Baum, David
- Lehman, Niles
- Venue
- Life
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2017-08-25
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 34
- ISSN
- 2075-1729 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5617959
- OpenAlex
- W2747419135
- Cited by
- 9
- References
- 5
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 2 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 0.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Life (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PDXScholar (Portland State University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- NASA (IDEAS16-0002)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Origins and Evolution of Life
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy and History of Science
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms
- Keywords
- origin of life, digital information, information encoding, DNA, RNA, early Earth, origin of complex life
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