LUCA latest: a bacterium stripped of unessential genes (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 06, 2023, 11:56 (296 days ago) @ David Turell

LUCA latest: a bacterium stripped of unessential genes

DAVID: And it evolved:
https://phys.org/news/2023-07-artificial-cells-life.html

QUOTES: "'It appears there's something about life that's really robust," says Lennon. "We can simplify it down to just the bare essentials, but that doesn't stop evolution from going to work."
"The research done by Lennon and his team demonstrates the power of natural selection to rapidly optimize fitness in the simplest autonomous organism, with implications for the evolution of cellular complexity. In other words, it shows that life finds a way."

DAVID: since this resembles earliest life it indicates that life has a built-in drive for survival.

It indicates far, far more than that! It indicates that there is a built–in mechanism which enables cells autonomously to EVOLVE in response to the requirements of the environment. But it’s not the power of natural selection that does this, because natural selection does not create anything – it only determines what does or does not survive. So what IS the power that enables cells to restructure themselves autonomously? I would suggest that James A. Shapiro has the answer: cellular intelligence. How did such a mechanism originate? David Turell suggests it was designed by an unknown, eternal, sourceless mind we call God. No doubt Richard Dawkins would suggest it arose by chance. Panpsychists believe that all spatio-temporal things have some kind of quasi-consciousness. Dhw finds all these theories equally hard to believe, and remains perched on his agnostic fence.

My thanks to David for this extremely important and revealing article, which posits the autonomous ability of cells to conduct their own evolution. Worth a post of its own.