Transcendental Nectar of Sadhu-Sanga

by

Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D.

Respected Dr Pokharna,

There are several problems with Eigen’s seminal theoretical paper, actually published in 1971, on the self organization of matter. The practical problems of the RNA world have already been mentioned several times on this forum. Freeman Dyson explains, "for the Eigen theory to work, four "catastrophes" need to be avoided. First is the "error catastrophe," where there are simply too many errors in replication of long RNA molecules. Second is the "selfish RNA catastrophe," where an RNA molecule mutates and dominates the scene, but the mutation takes away its critical role as a catalyst. Third is the "short-circuit catastrophe," where a mutated RNA molecule catalyzes the wrong reaction (a later one in a chain than the proper one). Fourth is the "population collapse catastrophe," where one simply runs out of a critical component."

Manfred Eigen himself noted that this mutation process places a limit on the number of digits a molecule may have. If a molecule exceeds this critical size, the effect of the mutations become overwhelming and a runaway mutation process will destroy the information in subsequent generations of the molecule. This critical mutation rate, or "error threshold" is crucial to understanding "Eigen's paradox."

Eigen's paradox is one of the most intractable puzzles in the study of the origins of life. It is thought that the error threshold concept described above limits the size of self replicating molecules to perhaps a few hundred digits, yet almost all life on earth requires much longer molecules to encode their genetic information. This problem is handled in living cells by the presence of enzymes which repair mutations, allowing the encoding molecules to reach sizes on the order of millions of base pairs. These large molecules must, of course, encode the very enzymes that repair them, and herein lies Eigen's paradox:

1. Without error correction enzymes, the maximum size of a replicating molecule is about 100 base pairs.
2. In order for a replicating molecule to encode error correction enzymes, it must be substantially larger than 100 bases.

There is the further problem that self-organization relates to organized matter, but not to information. As Paul Davies states: "Life is actually not an example of self-organization. Life is in fact specified--i.e., genetically directed--organization." In other words, the sequence specific order of large DNA molecules is not explained on the basis of physical and chemical laws, and yet this "information" is critical in determining the function of the DNA "code." Eigen, himself, realizes this in his 1992 paper where he states: "Our task is to find an algorithm, a natural law that leads to the origin of [this] information."

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