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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The word 'Ribosome' does not occur anywhere in the article, which I definitely would expect to be there if you're going to make a coding analogy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome

For a computing analogy: a Ribosome serves as a molecular assembler (a processor) that depending on the instructions (the program) encoded in DNA (or rather RNA by the time the ribosome is working with it) pulls this or that molecule from the soup present in a cell to attach it to its working copy of a polypeptide chain (the output). Once complete (as signalled by a 'stop' codon, think of it as 'ETX') the thing detaches the product.

The Ribosome consists of a main engine and a 'cap' that can attach over the top of an RNA string so that it can start transcription at other points ('STX') than just the ends.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosomal_frameshift if you really want to bend your brain a little.

Yes, that reminds me of some of the assembly tricks we used to pull when space was really tight. Use this entry point and you have one set of instructions, use another and you get a completely different set. I've never managed to do this with more than a few instructions. But that gives quite a kick to get it to work and to know that there isn't a disassembler on the planet that will make sense of it :)

There is an analogy with data compression: if you remove a byte, in for example a zip file, and then try to expand it, it might work and give you a different result (it likely doesn't due to a checksum error). I think something similar was used in the SHA-1 collision attack (shattered.io) to generate different jpeg images that have the same checksum.

There's a very interesting hypothesis about the origin of life that puts a primitive ribosomal assembly of amino and nucleic acids at the center. The idea is that these amino chains and nucleic acid chains (protein and RNA) kept self-assembling until a version was created cabable of self-replication. This posits abiological generation of nucleic and amino acids and linked chains as well.

Once these primitive ribosomes were capable of reproducing themselves (presumably with a very high initial mutation rate), biological evolution began. Such ribosomes would have two jobs: reproduction of nucleic acid chains, and translation of some fraction of those nucleic acid chains into protein chains. Not all the amino acids would have been used at this early stage.

This is perhaps a more manageable analogy to coding than looking at something as complex as the human genome, which I think is a real error in the article (though of course humans are more interested in their own genome). It'd make more sense if the author had used one of the smaller independent bacterial genomes as the model.

Agreed, if you want to explain something you should do so from the simplest example, not from one of the most complex examples.

I've been curious for a while whether attempts have been made to simulate exactly this sort of evolutionary bootstrapping. It would make the theory much more plausible if under certain simulated conditions we could see life emerge. But maybe that's too computationally intense to do effectively.

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