Newsgroups: comp.ai.alife
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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: "What is Life?"
Message-ID: <1995Jan31.005612.327@news.media.mit.edu>
Keywords: life definition
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Cc: minsky
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
References: <3gbhj1$klg@engnews2.eng.sun.com> <3gf43d$dvt@news.tamu.edu> <3gjmlt$1ns@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: Tue, 31 Jan 1995 00:56:12 GMT
Lines: 19

In article <3gjmlt$1ns@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> holtz@netcord.Eng.Sun.COM (Brian Holtz) writes:

>I think the beginning of life almost has to
>be a discrete event.  It may take a while for the first useful
>evolutionary changes to take hold, but the initial pattern of
>reproduction should not be hard to spot (if only in hindsight).

I think there's an unjustified assumption in the very concept of "initial pattern of"
reproduction.  If there were one, it might be easy to spot.  However,
it seems rather unlikely that it began with a recognizable copying.
More likely, I think, there were some dispersed combinations of
catalysts that happened to have slightly better than chhnce tendency
to synthesize one of more chemicals that also can help synthesize one
of those chemicals or a similar one.  Eventually, with luck, some of
these get concentrated in a sufficiently isolated sub-pond for a few
of these to get linked together in a form that has some additional
partial-autocatalytic activity.  After a long time, something more
like reproduction might emerge.  

