Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Our DNA (2017)

Re:Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Our DNA (2017) by narag on Monday October 01, 2018 @08:44AM (#18112041)

There's an unbroken chain between everything current living thing and the first living thing...

I don't think that's an established fact at all. DNA is a very complex system so it's reasonable to think that simpler systems predated it. Not that it affects your reasoning at all, since every current living thing that we know of does use DNA.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Our DNA (2017) by agumonkey on Monday October 01, 2018 @08:53AM (#18112107)

I do believe there's an abstract principle that we share with anything that sustained its structure. Not a specific thing like a set of genes but the underlying set of chaos-avoiding rules that makes living forms living forms.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Our DNA (2017) by asdff on Monday October 01, 2018 @05:33PM (#18117012)

These rules are the laws of thermodynamics.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Our DNA (2017) by agumonkey on Tuesday October 02, 2018 @05:32AM (#18120030)

I thought we were the optimized thermodynamics dual/dampener. Our system fight to slow entropy.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ancient Viruses Are Buried in Our DNA (2017) by asdff on Monday October 01, 2018 @05:38PM (#18117051)

The RNA world hypothesis proposes that self-replicating RNA molecules proliferated before DNA, which would be that simpler system as it doesn't require complex protein machinery.

[ Parent | on HN ]