Plamen wrote:
I begin to believe that the transition from abiotic to biotic structures,
incl. Maturana-Varela.-Uribe’s autopoiesis may, really have some underlying
matrix/”skeleton”/”programme” which has nothing in common with the nature
of DNA, and that DNA and RNA as we know them today may
This is a reply to Plamen’s comment about autopoeisis. In their paper
Maturana,Uribe and Varela give a working model (computer model) for autopoeisis.
It is very simple, consisting of a subtrate of nodal elements that tend to bond
when in proximity, and a collection of catalytic nodal elements
Thank you for your responses, Lou and Stan. I am aware about the details of
the autopoietic model. What I was actually addressing by the transition
from abiotic to biotic structures and the later emergence of RNA and DNA
was this elusive aspect of “mass action” which Stan mentioned, that in my
I personally consider metabolism to be at the core of what constitutes ‘life’,
so the notion of autopoeisis is very attractive to me. It is also possible
that the richness of life as we know it depends on having metabolisms
(activity), genomes (memory), and reproduction combined. The
Dear Guy,
Please allow me to respond to your invitation to Terry with my two cents.
My triad for supporting the dynamics of life is a bit different. I see the
three essential fundamentals as:
1. Aleatoricism
2. Feedback
3. Memory
Just to briefly elaborate on each:
1. I use aleatoricism to
Josephson and Deutsh are not ‘deeper than QM’. Deutsch for example is a very
literal interpretation of QM that says that all the trajectories in the Feynman
path sum are real, and they occur in parallel universes. This is a nice
mathematical way to think, but it is not deeper than present QM!
Dear Lou, Pedro and All,
I am going to present a few opportunistic ideas related to what was said
before in this session. Coming back to Pivar’s speculative
mechano-topological model of life excluding genetics I wish to turn your
attention to another author with a similar idea but on a sound
