Brand new concept (for me) mixed in with some biology news

[P3nT4gR4m]

http://phys.org/news/2014-06-scientists-capture-images-humans-tiny.html

The team found that in U6, the Prp24 protein and RNA—like two partners holding hands—are intimately linked together in a type of molecular symbiosis. The structure yields clues about the relationship and the relative ages of RNA and proteins, once thought to be much wider apart on an evolutionary time scale.

"What's so cool is the degree of co-evolution of RNA and protein," Brow says. "It's obvious RNA and protein had to be pretty close friends already to evolve like this."

So I'd never thought much about the period in history when a puddle of amino acids turned into DNA. This article mentions that RNA evolved first and I've always had this vague gap in my head where - amino acids and then something something something and then BINGO- Nanofactories!

The thing with gaps in my head is, quite often, I don't notice them. The other thing is, once I become aware of them, some administrative function demands they are filled in with as much reliable information as is available. So I come to the good people of PD, cos I know that often, in matters such as these, it's often faster than Google.



If there an equivalent to this somewhere with chemicals on the left and Cells on the right?

[LMNO]

May I offer you a piece of advice, not just for PD, but for life in general?  Taken with however many grains of salt you please, of course.

It doesn't generally behoove you to make fantastically wild leaps of deductive logic using grossly inaccurate metaphors that "sorta-kinda" relate to your deepest wishes when thinking about a piece of research or latest study that's far oustide your (admittedly impressive) current scope of knowledge.

Generally, it makes people shake their heads and act all snarky.

[P3nT4gR4m]

May I offer you a piece of advice, not just for PD, but for life in general?  Taken with however many grains of salt you please, of course.

It doesn't generally behoove you to make fantastically wild leaps of deductive logic using grossly inaccurate metaphors that "sorta-kinda" relate to your deepest wishes when thinking about a piece of research or latest study that's far oustide your (admittedly impressive) current scope of knowledge.

Generally, it makes people shake their heads and act all snarky.

Whilst I accept what your saying as applying to me and would actually go as far as to thank you for your input, I'm finding it hard to see how this is applicable to this thread specifically. My intention was to ask a simple question, along the same lines someone who'd never heard of ape-man evolution might ask, only about how some chemicals turned into cells.

The only possibility that strikes  me is that perhaps it's well known that scientists have no idea right now but the notion that RNA evolved before DNA strongly suggests that they know a damn sight more than I do. This isn't really a "deepest wishes" trip I'm on. It's more just idle curiosity.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

There's some thought out there that RNA was the life code at the very beginning, and that the switch to DNA happened later. It's hard for us to be sure of these things of course. I'm not sure if I'd portray it quite like humans arising from apes, if only for the fact that it's not the easiest period in life's history to work out. Anyway, some species of virus still use RNA instead of DNA. I don't think I'm at the point yet where I can answer that question, but it is an area that I am interested in.

[P3nT4gR4m]

AHA! Seems I was wrong then. Apologies for any feathers ruffled. FTR - If I ask a question, it's generally cos I have no idea and may be operating under the assumption that somebody does. If it's a current area of investigation then I'm looking forward to whatever gets discovered, if and when.

For the other part - making wild extrapolations, based on current developments, I'll dial that off. I've found another forum where people are quite happy to daydream about what might happen on the back of scientific discovery, so there's no reason to inflict it on people who quite obviously get pissed off by these things.

Once again - I apologise to anyone who feels they are owed one.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

AHA! Seems I was wrong then. Apologies for any feathers ruffled. FTR - If I ask a question, it's generally cos I have no idea and may be operating under the assumption that somebody does. If it's a current area of investigation then I'm looking forward to whatever gets discovered, if and when.

For the other part - making wild extrapolations, based on current developments, I'll dial that off. I've found another forum where people are quite happy to daydream about what might happen on the back of scientific discovery, so there's no reason to inflict it on people who quite obviously get pissed off by these things.

Once again - I apologise to anyone who feels they are owed one.

Daydreaming is good. Without imagination things don't get thought up. No feathers ruffled on my end (I am a mammal, after all).

[Cramulus]

So I'd never thought much about the period in history when a puddle of amino acids turned into DNA. This article mentions that RNA evolved first and I've always had this vague gap in my head where - amino acids and then something something something and then BINGO- Nanofactories!



If there an equivalent to this somewhere with chemicals on the left and Cells on the right?

interesting question! Hadn't thought about that either.

Digging around a little on cellular evolution, I found this, which isn't quite what you're asking, but has the same skeleton...

[Cramulus]

Maybe this is more what you're looking for? Organic particles on the left, RNA on the right?

(image shrunk to 800 wide, you may need to right click-> view for full size)


I admit I have zero understanding of the above image.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Maybe this is more what you're looking for? Organic particles on the left, RNA on the right?

(image shrunk to 800 wide, you may need to right click-> view for full size)


I admit I have zero understanding of the above image.

This is pretty good as an abstract representation, sort of.

Pent, I would say that I think what LMNO was knee-jerking to is the same thing I've been knee-jerking to, which is that you've been doing the thing he's talking about rather a lot and it's sounds like he's gotten to the point I'm at, which is "ugh, Pent's spouting off and making outlandish claims about things he doesn't understand again" and doesn't finish reading the post. Not to mention that it's incredibly frustrating to be the science jerk who says "it actually doesn't work that way" only to have you repeatedly insist that I don't know what I'm talking about.

That said, for the most part we really only gave fuzzy and vague ideas about what might have happened in the sequence of events that brought us from the formation of amino acids to DNA, but here are some links and videos that might be of interest.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoERVSWKmGk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kK2zwjRV0M
http://exploringorigins.org/ribozymes.html
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIE2bStudyorigins.shtml

[P3nT4gR4m]

Yeah, I can appreciate that. I suspect I follow science for a different reason to yourself. I may be well off base here but I see scientists and technologists as being two completely different occupations, working the discovery mines.

Scientists are at the coal face, constantly digging out new information and, in the process, uncovering new evidence of how much is still unknown. As Neil Degrasse Tyson (and a few others) said - it's being constantly reminded of the scale of our ignorance (or words to that effect)

Technologists, on the other hand, deal only with the information "ore" mined by the researchers. "what we don't know is of no relevance to me, give me what we do know and I'll see how I can use it." Our stock in trade is not discovery, like the scientists, it's a creative process, leveraging these discoveries to make tech.

As such, the focus of science could be seen as present-tense - how much do we know, let's find out some more. Tech is focused on the future. What do we need to build a teleporter? How do we get there? Scientific discovery always comes with a caveat - we've sussed out X but we don't know Y. Tech doesn't do "we don't know" so we can ignore the stuff we don't know, it's totally irrelevant. We mainly deal with stuff that doesn't exist yet and we work at making it exist.

Take neurobiology for example. They figured out a bit about how neurons connect and pass information but it came with a huge caveat - "there's a fuckton of stuff we don't know and it'll take forever to work it out." So the techs got a hold of this info and the first thing they did was discarded all the stuff to the right hand side of the "but" statement cos it wasn't relevant to them and they said "whoa, this neural networking stuff is awesome what can we do with it?"

Then they looked into the future and figured if they could build a software or (even better) hardware platform that emulated the way neurons connect, transport and store information, it'd make a whole lot of "cognitive" digital applications much smoother, faster, more accurate, and so they did it and, sure enough, it was massive. The whole time, I've no doubt there were scientists saying - "Fools errand. These idiots don't realise how much we still have to learn."

So essentially, a scientific person will always be coming into the future with a sense of our limitations, whereas a technologist will see nothing but potential.

When I hear new scientific discoveries I immediately look to the future. Often the puzzle-answer revelation is kinda interesting to me, too,  but it's never anywhere near as interesting as what the implementations of this new info will be when writ large in tech. By definition, this is in the future. So it's speculation and guesswork. And the scientists are all saying "no no no, it's going to take ages til we have a complete picture."

I suspect this attitude frustrates technologists just as much but at least we have the option to go build awesome new shit instead of listening to how long it's going to take to figure out the next thing. So I'm happy enough to do that and I'm more than happy to cease commenting on potential tech implementations of new scientific discoveries. Arguing the toss, quickly becomes tedious and doesn't really enrich the creative idea sphere to any degree.

Again - apologies for any frustration caused. It ends with this thread

[LMNO]

OK, I got you.  Makes sense.  Sorry if I sounded like a cranky old guy.

[P3nT4gR4m]

No harm no foul. Please appreciate that I sympathize completely with my detractors levels of frustration, since I'm subject to the same levels of frustration on the back end.

Try to imagine how excited I was about things like the i-phone, ten or fifteen years ago when I could clearly see where the chip, display and interface roadmaps were headed. However, when I expressed this excitement to non futurist/technologist peers I got the - "Never happen, there's so much we can't do yet" thing.

Now I'm surrounded by a bunch of excited muppets going on about the new Iphone 6 and the (maybe) new Amazon handset with the holographic display and I'm like, oh ffs, this shit was boring the piss out of me back in 2010, can we talk about AR or Smart plastics yet?

[Reginald Ret]

Interesting conversation.

Could this difference in perspective come from a different approach to failure?

For a Scientist failure has value because it teaches them what not to do.
So they put equal effort in things regardless of the chances of failure.

Technologists place no value in failure because they are not interested in what isn´t possible.
So they try to fail early and cheaply, so they have more cash/energy/whatever left over for succes.

This causes the Scientist to become cautious with the Technologist's enthousiasm because they know the Technologist sees no point in failure and they know how much failure can cost¹.
While the Technologist doesn't get why the Scientist is so scared of failure when failure costs very little¹ and they know the Scientist values failure anyway.

1^{In their situation, disregarding the other's context because they don't know enough about it.}

[Nephew Twiddleton]

That's an interesting take and similar to what I was thinking about it earlier. The scientist by nature has to be skeptical, preferably even with his or her own ideas. A scientist has to be cautious and conservative in their estimations.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Pent, I'll see if I can scan up my notes from biotech and get them to you. I think it's cool that you're interested in what we can do with out biological knowledge. If the technologist works with what we know and runs with it, then I'll give you what I know. Or at least what I'm supposed to know at this point. I'll send you the labs too, so you can see what we did and go from there with the techniques. Since I'm taking genetics this semester, I can also give you a run down of the experiments that we do there as well. I'll plop those down in the Yo Pent Biotech thread, as we do them.