Metabolism is like the hardware of a computer system: it processes "information," keeps the cell alive, and is primarily thought of occurring with the protein of a cell.
Replication is like the software of this computer system: it embodies "information," allowing copies of the cell to be made, and is mostly thought of as occurring in cell Nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA.
Using this analogy, the author makes the argument for a dual-origin hypothesis in which the first life only had metabolic functions, and replication was added later. This makes sense in the analogy because without hardware, software cannot run, but hardware without software functionally does not make sense. Thus 'software' (nucleic acid) came along as a parasitic existence after metabolic life had been around for some time, using the protein based metabolic cells as hosts to live off of.
No comments:
Post a Comment