In “How the first life on Earth struggled to survive” (MSNBC.com, April 19, 2012), Charles Choi explains,
The earliest cells were unstable chemical systems that survived by combining a handful of shaky carbon-based assemblies together, researchers say.
If that’s true, life should be bustin’ out all over, spontaneous generation style. Yet it never is.
“It seems likely that the earliest cells were rickety assemblies whose parts were constantly malfunctioning and breaking down,” said researcher Eric Smith, a physicist at the Santa Fe Institute. “How can any metabolism be sustained with such shaky support? The key is concurrent and constant redundancy.”
But wouldn’t the errors be redundant as well? This theory maybe works if you suppose that hits matter and misses don’t.
In other words, free lunch.
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