Let's Watch: 10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution - Eörs Szathmáry

This post is supposed to be a prequel to my upcoming post on the major transitions in the evolution of life on earth. Eörs Szathmáry is a good lecturer and the lecture gives a very clean overview of the origin of self-replication, evolvability, and the relation of evolution with learning theory. I am reading about this, because I think AI might cause another major transition in evolution in a similar way.

This post will give annotations, references, and comments, to read along the lecture.

The "10-on-10" comes from Sydney Brenner's 10-on-10, of which this lecture is a part:

These seminars would begin $10^{10}$ years ago with the origin of the universe, then move on to the beginnings of biological life $10^9$ years ago, and so on, up to the development of modern human society in the present time, or $10^1$ years.

Clenes and Genes: Evolution of clay and the genetic takeover

This post is heavily based on Tim Tyler's page. It has lots of dead pictures, so view them on the Internet Archive if you see them.

Genes are not the only thing that can copy themselves. Computer virus, RNA, protein virus (prion), and chain mails, they all can.

The idea of non-gene replicators is not new. Richard Dawkins proposed memes in The Selfish Gene (1976), and Graham Cairns‑Smith proposed clay-genes (clenes?) in The origin of life and the nature of the primitive gene (1966). Genes and memes are getting all the popularities, but clenes aren't, so I'll summarize clene theory. A detailed explanation is here.

Overview of clenes and genes

First we check the 1966 paper's abstract:

Life on earth evolved through natural selection from inorganic crystals.

During the formation of a crystal, certain kinds of lattice imperfections usually replicate as a necessary part of the crystallization process.

... the primitive genographs were patterns of substitutions in colloidal clay crystallites. (The theoretical information density in such a crystallite is comparable to that in DNA.)... A gradual “take-over” of the control machinery by organic macromolecules—a genetic metamorphosis—is then considered to have occurred.

News Aggregate: Moonshots!

So in the last post I mentioned that the BioGenome Project was called a "moonshot", turns out there's more moonshots. Quite a few! Makes me wonder how many moons do we have... Am I on Jupiter??

Chemistry

Martin Burke is moonshooting for automated chemistry synthesis. Most chemicals are made very inflexibly. Basically, chemists start with a chemical to synthesize, then do a bunch of trials and errors until they get a synthesis receipe that is just cheap and with a high enough yield to be useful.

Human chemists planning a synthesis tend to use a technique called retrosynthetic analysis. They draw the finished molecule and then pick it apart, erasing bonds that would be easy to form and leaving fragments of molecule that are stable or readily available. 

Example: synthesis of Ibuprofen