There's a lot here, and I don't disagree with most of it. I do interpret it a
bit different. I've snipped a lot.

 And chemical reactions are very heat sensitive.

I agree. When I was writing about the branching chains of catalytic
cause+effect after seeing somebody else post about it (original work
published circa 1997 if I remember correctly), I failed to think of the
following: In different environments, including at different
temperatures, any given catalyst causes a different rate of reaction
toward any particular product, and the race between such production and
thermal or chemical decomposition of the product would be different,
and so some products which are themselves catalysts might stay around
long enough to be useful in one environment while decompose too quickly
in another. Consequently, one chain might extend very far and have lots
of branchings from it in one environment while that same chain might be
very short and produce hardly any branchings in another. Two different
environments would therefore have different total quantity of chains,
different numbers of branchings, different quantity of total products,
and even in cases where two environments have approximately the same
total amount, the particular chains in existance could be significantly
different most/all of the time.

TH
This is an elegant version of my idea of temperature
symbiosis. I'd like to add one thing concerning the genetic code. Codons with A
in the important 2nd spot are often hydrophilic, codons with U in the important
2nd positiona re often hydrophobic. IF there was some temperature difference
that set up two groups of amino acids, then you would have group A (in second
spot) at temp X coding  for hydrophilic amino acids, and  group U (in secodn
spot) at temp Y coding for hydrophobic amino acids.
One group may well be in water, the other in a dry state.
That would suggest a means of starting the coding system. Comment?

(snipped)


> I can't accept that a catalyst needs food. Why?

A catalytic *cycle* (loop) needs food to survive. If there's not enough
food for each catalyst to manufacture the next catalyst in the loop
faster than it gets destroyed by thermal agitation and random chemical
attack, then the loop breaks at any such point and fails to get
regenerated from that point forward, and eventually *all* the links in
the loop decompose

TH
Think this through a bit. First of all zircons last over 4 billion years, so
obviously that's a better survivor. The earth and Moon longer. What you are
saying is sort of a catch 22 where you define what's important to life by what
life does. If it really were all that advantageous why wouldn't salt, water,
gold, or air replicate itself?
Let's try to look at it completely objectively. And start with the premise -
nothing wants to live - which I believe is true. There is no chemical anywhere
that wants to live or catalyze or replicate or anything - Correct?

Now then we see that unless heat/energy forces chemicals to move , they won't.
Look at absolute zero. What chemicals move at that temp?
So are we agreed that life is that which is forced to change by heat?

Now we have two options. The heat destroys it or it doesnt. If it destroys it -
that part is over.
The other options is that it does not destroy it.
We have prebiotic materials, zircon, CO2 and other 'survivors". But this
pre-life stuff has novelties that the others do not. They not only survive, but
through the chemical processes, they have the novel way of surviving with flare
- of making their survival more likely.
Thus life is that which moderates heat to do work, evolve, replicate, and all
the other things.

Life is not an end we need to get to.
Life is the reaction of what came before it.
Life is the echo not the voice. And you can't put the echo before the voice.

So as to food, nothing needs it. It is this heat (not food). It is this energy,
not food  that FORCES change on inanimate matter into variants - some that are
life.

Do you see how one has to relook at life to make sense of it?


Also I welcom your comments on my new post on how ATP may have been the first
to connect the worlds of amino acids, and nucleotides.

Best wishes,
Tom











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