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[Why a cell vs a gene or partial gene?] There's been plenty of work done on RNA replicators and they have a tendency to become smaller and simpler an… - Nick Lane
" "[Why a cell vs a gene or partial gene?] There's been plenty of work done on RNA replicators and they have a tendency to become smaller and simpler and effectively better able to make copies of themselves with whatever you provide them in the environment, and they end up with a thing called , which is basically the binding sequence of the which allows it to furiously replicate away. ...If you're providing in the environmwent an RNA polymerase and an infinite supply of s then... they become simpler and simpler, and faster and faster at copying. ...The trouble is there isn't ever going to be an environment that's providing that for you except in a cellular context... If you're selecting at the level of genetic replication, the replicators that are better able to make copies of themselves fast are those which are, in effect, the most selfish and the least likely to cooperate to try and convert the environment into .
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About Nick Lane
(born 1967) is a British and writer. He is a professor in evolutionary at University College London. He has published five books to date which have won several awards.
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Additional quotes by Nick Lane
What is [life] it? Would we even recognize it. What I imagine we would find would be cell-like things. Not a million miles away from bacteria, using , probably in water, not because it's the only way of organizing. It's just that carbon is very good at that kind of chemistry. It's very common in the universe. Water is ubiquitous. We know, from the principles of life on earth, that all this stuff works and we know that it's thermodynamically favored. ...[J]ust statistically, I would expect, maybe 900 times out of a thousand that life would be organized in a similar way to life here. That's not to say it can't be different. It's just probably... going to be similar.
I would define complexity, not really as genetic complexity because if you take it purely as genetic complexity, E. coli... a single cell may have 4,000 genes but the metagenome, the pool of genes in E. coli around the place may be on the order to 30,000 or more... [T]hat's the level of complexity equivalent to the human genome, or even more complex than the human genome, but it's organized and structured in a different way. ...You might say that it's structured in a similar way to an ... but I think an ant colony has taken that level of Eusocial behavior a long way beyond anything you would see in E. coli. So I would define it as morphologically complex, meaning cells are larger and have a lot of stuff in them.
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