From ScienceDaily:
An international and interdisciplinary team working at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has modeled the evolution of one of biology’s most fundamental sets of building blocks and found that it may have special properties that helped bootstrap itself into its modern form. …
All life, from bacteria to blue whales to human beings, uses an almost universal set of 20 coded amino acids (CAAs) to construct proteins. This set was likely “canonicalized” or standardized during early evolution; before this, smaller amino acid sets were gradually expanded as organisms developed new synthetic proofreading and coding abilities. The new study, led by Melissa Ilardo, now at the University of Utah, explored how this set evolution might have occurred.
There are millions of possible types of amino acids that could be found on Earth or elsewhere in the Universe, each with its own distinctive chemical properties. Indeed, scientists have found these unique chemical properties are what give biological proteins, the large molecules that do much of life’s catalysis, their own unique capabilities. The team had previously measured how the CAA set compares to random sets of amino acids and found that only about 1 in a billion random sets had chemical properties as unusually distributed as those of the CAAs. …
They found that even hypothetical sets containing only one or a few modern CAAs were especially adaptive. It was difficult to find sets even among a multitude of alternatives that have the unique chemical properties of the modern CAA set. These results suggest that each time a modern CAA was discovered and embedded in biology’s toolkit during evolution, it provided an adaptive value unusual among a huge number of alternatives, and each selective step may have helped bootstrap the developing set to include still more CAAs, ultimately leading to the modern set.
If true, the researchers speculate, it might mean that even given a large variety of starting points for developing coded amino acid sets, biology might end up converging on a similar set. As this model was based on the invariant physical and chemical properties of the amino acids themselves, this could mean that even Life beyond Earth might be very similar to modern Earth life. Co-author Rudrarup Bose, now of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, further hypothesizes that “Life may not be just a set of accidental events. Rather, there may be some universal laws governing the evolution of life.” Paper. (open access) – Melissa Ilardo, Rudrarup Bose, Markus Meringer, Bakhtiyor Rasulev, Natalie Grefenstette, James Stephenson, Stephen Freeland, Richard J. Gillams, Christopher J. Butch, H. James Cleaves. Adaptive Properties of the Genetically Encoded Amino Acid Alphabet Are Inherited from Its Subsets. Scientific Reports, 2019; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-47574-x More.
It’s worth noting that the origin of the term “bootstrap”:
a loop of leather or cloth sewn at the top rear, or sometimes on each side, of a boot to facilitate pulling it on.
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Idiom:
pull (oneself) up by (one’s) bootstraps, to help oneself without the aid of others; use one’s resources:
I admire him for pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.
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It’s not clear that this can really be done, using only naturalistic resources.
It sounds as though these researchers want to quietly abandon Darwinian randomness in favor of a structuralist approach to the unfolding of life but — understandably — do not want to hear from an army of angry Darwinian orcs.
See also: Do genes that jump shake the tree of life? Yes. But what hope is there that textbooks could start teaching reality when even the right to question the Darwinian filler is still a big controversy in many places? Could science writers like Jabr and others agree that it is time to make textbooks about evolution sound like the reality and not like the 1925 Monkey Trial revisited?
The first word in the paper’s title is “adaptive”, so… no.
Mimus@1
From today’s article:
“… smaller amino acid sets were gradually expanded as organisms developed new synthetic proofreading and coding abilities. ”
??????
“…as organisms developed new synthetic proofreading…” ??????
organisms DEVELOPED a PROOFREADING ?
Let me paraphrase R Dawkins:
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims that DNA proofreading and repair was not designed, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that)
Mimus and the other drooling followers of Darwin:
You’ve never read Darwin’s book. Read his own words. Otherwise, you are merely telling others what you’ve been told by someone else. Darwin has been disproven many times over.
What’s wrong with you, BobRyan?
I’ve read Darwin’s book(s). You repeatedly claim Darwin wrote things that we simply did not. When asked to provide a citation nothing is forthcoming. So I’m not sure if this is some sort of performance-art trolling exercise or you are just very confused?
When Darwin included the 4 races, believing that blacks were not as evolved as the other races, do you agree with that part of his theory? If you actually read Darwin, then you would have to admit that not everything we know today fits nicely into his little bow. Not one Darwinist has actually provided a shred of evidence that macro-evolution exists at all. It has never been viewed and does not hold to valid scientific thought.
as to:
Oh goody, computer models and statistical methods to compare the adaptive values of the physiochemical properties of amino acids instead of the functionality of proteins themselves. Small problem, there can be no replication to select from without functional proteins in the first place. As Dr. Cornelius Hunter quipped about a similar unrealistic ‘model’, “In other word, for evolution to evolve proteins, they must already exist in the first place.”
Whereas in the real world of empirical science, the fact of the matter is that, as far as empirical science itself is concerned, (instead of these unrealistic computer models and statistical methods where the unrestrained imaginations of Darwinists are apparently allowed to roam free), functional proteins are exceedingly rare. So rare that a leading researcher stated, “The appearance of early protein families is “something like close to a miracle.” And “In fact, to our knowledge no macromutations … that gave birth to novel proteins have yet been identified.”
As to ‘statistical methods’ in general, Ilya Prigogine, an eminent chemist and physicist who received two Nobel Prizes in chemistry, stated,
An imaginative and fascinating Darwinian story:
Once upon a time, a variety of lifeforms existed with varied sets of amino acids. Thus, these lifeforms already had massive amounts of bio-information to pass on to their progeny. Leave aside for the moment the likelihood that any mutation to that information would be deleterious or fatal; e.g. swapping different random amino acid into pre-proteins is not likely to be a good thing. Somehow these lifeforms came up with other amino acids (randomly collected or somehow produced), which were somehow coded into their bio-information (pre-genome). Since only one in a billion of these sets of amino acids is suitably useful, there must have been a lot of mistakes before zeroing in on the optimum set of 20. Also, somehow the old pre-proteins continued to work despite the changed bio-information and the new amino acid added to the mix, by coincidentally new mechanisms for their selection and bonding.
Never mind all that, eventually the full set of 20 amino acids was collected and the lifeform continued to live and reproduce. Then somehow, all those older, sub-optimal amino acids (“junk bio-molecules” anyone?), along with their support machinery, were discarded in favour of new ones, via the ever-efficient process of natural selection, all while preserving the lifeform’s viability and reproductive talent at each small step. Then all the other lifeforms did the same things and settled on the same one-in-a-billion set, along with all its support machinery and identical coding hardware. Or perhaps the first one to find the gold ring (AKA optimum set of 20) out-competed everything else so well that the others were left in the dust of common descent, so that all current lifeforms now share the same set of 20 and there are no residues of earlier lifeforms, either living or fossilized, to show that once upon a time there were other variants, notwithstanding that there are examples of lifeforms unchanged in a billion years hiding in ecological niches.
“Once upon a time” is how fairy tales begin, and this one is similar.
BobRyan,
In which of his books did Darwin “[include] the 4 races, believing that blacks were not as evolved “? Or are you just making it up?
Before life can start to select for optimal amino acids it must first start with some minimal set as a viable reproducing organism. How did that happen? How small can that minimum set of amino acids be?