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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (2362)	10/23/2000 11:13:48 PM
From: TigerPaw	Respond to of 28931

"highly anomalous" considering we don't see anything else other than life that seems to do it. I object! You pick the prime example for dismissal. Other than life ? Life shows the power of replication and selection to realize that the first replicators took over the planet and has dominated it for 4 billion years. It is less likely that two chemically independant forms and processes of life should arise at the same time. Once life as we know it took hold, the evolutionary possibilities were so profound that they quickly made any newly emerging form too primitive to compete. There are primitive replication modes which we don't call life (prions of the type which cause mad-cow disease is a good example), but these become food for life before they evolve. . So, where does this library of hardware and software devices live before it is coded into DNA? Apparently in RNA, which is both information storage and catalist (unless of course it has to compete with the much more successfull DNA molecule). RNA's weakness is that it is single stranded, and therefore more prone to mutation. And if the RNA theory is correct, the first creatures would have been pretty abysmal groups of amino acids that just happened to contain an RNA strand and so reproduced. Of course those that reproduced better tended to dominate the environment, and those who attracted or produced a protective bubble did even better, and some did better still. That's the story of life on Earth. TP