June 27, 2012
An Interview With Freeman Dyson on the Origins of Life on Earth
by
Suzan Mazur
“Then after that came us — stage six. That’s the end of the Darwinian era, when cultural evolution replaces biological evolution as the main driving force. “Cultural” means that the big changes in living conditions are driven by humans spreading their technology and their ways of making a living, by learning from one another rather than breeding.”
— Freeman Dyson, Eastover Farm
"Several weeks ago the
Lonsdale prize went to researchers who think first life was RNA, a replicating creature. So I rang up
Freeman Dyson, emeritus professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, to see if he still embraces the idea that original life was a “garbage bag world,” a membranous creature with dirty water trapped inside that reproduced for a billion years or more with high rates of error before replicating.
"Dyson does the math on this in his book,
Origins of Life(2nd. ed.), based on
Alexander Oparin’s cell-first theory of metabolism. Dyson calls it his “toy boat model,” calculated with pencil and paper, where thousands of molecular units make the leap from disorder to order with “reasonable probability.”
"During our phone conversation, Dyson told me that he does indeed still hold to his hypothesis and also still thinks RNA was a byproduct of that first creature’s own metabolism, emerging as a parasite and eventual symbiotic partner. He says it doesn’t make sense that original life copied itself without getting its act together first.
"In his
Origins book, Dyson also refers to
Doron Lancet’s work on defining metabolism, also based on Oparin’s model, by computer simulations of origin of life, saying:
“Doron Lancet has tackled this problem by studying computer models of the evolution of molecular populations, which he calls replicative-homeostatic early assemblies (RHEA). In these models, metabolism is defined in a general way as the evolution of a population in which some of the molecules catalyze the synthesis of others. He finds conditions under which populations can evolve to a high and self-sustaining level of catalytic organization.”
"This prompted me to call Doron Lancet, a professor at Weizmann Institute, to see what his current thinking is. I reached Lancet at a conference in Stockholm. He had this to say about Freeman Dyson:
“He was my first inspiration. A chapter in his book,
Infinite in All Directions, made me realize in the early 1990s that DNA/RNA was not necessarily the holy grail, and that there was an alternative in the form of molecular assemblies composed of mutually interacting simple molecules. The “Lipid World” model as a viable alternative to the “RNA World” would not have come to be without him.”
"Dyson envisions seven stages of life: "
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