Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life

[LuvNewcastle]

Here’s an interesting idea. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so. That has produced an exponential increase in the number of transistors on microchips and continues to do so.

But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s.

A similar process works with scientific publications. Between 1990 and 1960, they doubled in number every 15 years or so. Extrapolating this backwards gives the origin of scientific publication as 1710, about the time of Isaac Newton.

Today, Alexei Sharov at the National Institute on Ageing in Baltimore and his mate Richard Gordon at the Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida, have taken a similar to complexity and life.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/

[Benton D Struckcheon]

1. Inneresting

I downloaded the PDF and read the whole thing. One problem I saw was that they misunderstand the punctuated equilibrium argument. Part and parcel of it is the idea that the designs available narrow down with each mass extinction. The whole notion was that the survivors are chosen based on entirely random non-replicable circumstances, so that the designs available to the next set of life forms is actually less than the designs available to earlier ones.
Also, there's a lot of supposition in that paper. Fun read, but I'm not convinced.

[ljm2002]

2. A very interesting article...

...which seems to suggest that life is a property of the universe, not just of earth. Well that's what it suggests to me, anyway.

[Benton D Struckcheon]

3. Need to post this because it's about what I'm saying re punctuated equilibrium,

besides being hilarious:

https://twitter.com/LSPollack/status/326061042952175617/photo/1

Not sure who you'd substitute Great People and Masses for, but the point is, random has a lot to do with it, is the point of punctuated equilibrium.

[frogmarch]

4. Here:

A rebuttal:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/18/graaarh-physicists-biologists/

snip:

They cherrypicked their data points. They didn’t include lungfish, ferns, onions, or some protists because that would totally undermine their premise; those are contemporary organisms with much larger genomes than mammals’, and their shallow, stupid exercise in curve-fitting would have flopped miserably. It’s a great example of garbage in, garbage out.

There’s another figure, in which they slap their ‘origin of life’ numbers on a diagram of the history of the universe. Very convincing. I could also stick a label on such an image and show the ‘origin of clowns’ at the time of the Big Bang. It wouldn’t make it scientific, though.