Evolution Engineered

The Canadian women’s hockey team can now be called an Olympic dynasty! 3 gold medals in 3 Olympics! Woohoo! Now, it’s the men’s turn.

However, a “stain” on the Olympicsw occurred after. Don’t read further unless you have a strong stomach! Continue reading »

“Life-like evolution in a test tube” is the title of an article at Cosmos Magazine that describes a potential breakthrough in Origin-of-Life (OOL) research.  (HT RichardtHughes at AtBC )

For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes – that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components.

If true, this could help shed light on the RNA-World and create many different and intriguing lines of research. 

That said, there’s an obvious caveat: these RNA molecules were designed. For a purely natural RNA-World scenario to be true, scientists would have to show that a self-replicating RNA could have arisen through natural means, and last time I checked, they ain’t even close to demonstrating this.

Keep in mind I am NOT questioning whether evolutionary mechanisms exist. It is obvious that they do exist and function in nature. However, take a good look at what Dr. Joyce and his colleagues did: they took their knowledge of how living things work and change/evolve, and used it to create an RNA molecule that “evolves” (or runs under the properties of known evolutionary mechanisms). This is very similar to what engineers do, using their knowledge of the known world/universe to create an object or system to suit some predetermined function(s) or design objective(s). In essence, what Joyce et al. did was attempt to engineer life.

As if to reinforce the engineering aspect of the research, the article goes on to say:

The ultimate goal is to create genetic systems that behave like life, and are for all intents ‘life’ as we know it, but arose without using biological systems.

“The aim is to create systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment. But that we don’t have yet,” [molecular biologist Gerald Joyce] said. …

[Joyce continues] “They are synthetic genetic systems, and they are evolving. But they’re not living because they don’t yet show the capacity to invent functions out of whole cloth [independently from basic building blocks].

“The idea is to given them enough information wherewithal [build up enough genetic informaton] so they can start inventing their own solutions, rather than just optimising existing solutions,” he added.

To recap, Joyce et al. “create[d] … [synthetic] genetic systems that behave like life” (i.e. replicate and pass on genetic information – a simple design objective). Further research will have the goal of ”… creat[ing] systems that have inventive capabilities, that can develop novel solutions to challenges posed by the environment.” (i.e. predetermined function). To accomplish this, the researchers aim to “give them enough information wherewithal [build up enough genetic informaton] so they can start inventing their own solutions, rather than just optimising existing solutions…”

Golly gee! That sure sounds a lot like engineering and front-loading to me.

“Front-loading is the investment of a significant amount of information at the initial stage of evolution (the first life forms) whereby this information shapes and constrains subsequent evolution through its dissipation.”
p.147, The Design Matrix by Mike Gene

I thought FLE/design couldn’t lead to fruitful research. Silly me!

All kidding aside, this could set the stage for interesting new OOL research. Stay tuned!