Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life

[cronus]

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/51 ... n-of-life/

Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life

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.

These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.

That raises an interesting question. What happens if you extrapolate backwards to the point of no complexity–the origin of life?

Sharov and Gordon say that the evidence by this measure is clear. “Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,” they say.

And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin.

(continued)

[Clinton Huxley]

The question it suggests is, where is the error in their assumptions?

[Azathoth]

oversimplified. Shit research is shit

[Xamonas Chegwé]

It is a well known fact that life began in Cropwell Bishop around 10 billion years ago. The Earth was later built around the original site when more room was needed.

[Clinton Huxley]

Life began 40 years after the Earth formed because life begins at 40.

[JimC]

The complexity of living things is not an easy metric to define and measure, in comparison with the other examples.