Cell Language Theory, The: Connecting Mind And Matter

204 The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter

b2861 The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter “6x9”

sequences showed that certain sequences died out with time (see the 7- and

8-mers in Figure 4.9), whereas certain others (see the 11- and 12-mers)

grew with repeated “thermal cycling”.

Frustrations embedded in physical systems including primitive RNA

molecules (as contrasted with formal systems) are associated with both

sequence information and mechanical energy, but Anderson utilized only

the sequence information in synthesizing complementary RNA fragments

(see Figure 4.8) (thereby satisfying the symbolic aspect of Pattee’s princi-

ple of matter–symbol complementarity [89, 91]) but did not capitalize the

mechanical (i.e., conformational) energy available in frustrations embed-

ded in RNA to drive the synthesis of polymers (thereby failing to meet the

material/energetic part of the matter–symbol complementarity of von

Neumann and Pattee [21]). Anderson had to assume that “energy-rich”

monomers, i.e., nucleoside triphosphates (or nucleotides), were already

available in the primordial RNA soup, but the presence of nucleoside

triphosphates in the primordial soup may be very unlikely in view of its

chemical instability, even if they were assumed to be formed by accidental

coupling of five molecules belong to three different molecular species —

a base, a sugar, and inorganic phosphate.

Figure 4.9 The temporal evolution of RNA fragments obeying the death function

(Eq. (4.24)). Reproduced from [269].

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