Re: life as other than cellular/organismic

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

John M,

Re: this:

John M wrote:

snip

> Then (this was ~1990) I went back further in the process and fell in
> love with the idea of Cairns-Smith on the prebiotic (possible??)
> clay-life era. Here again I continued the 'creation' by my handicap of
> being a colloidal scientist and drew in the Miller experiment for amino
> acids (1935??) with the absorptive etc. surface phenomena of 'clay'
> conglomerates (be it phospho- or simply silicato- or more diversified)
> - macromolecules - (eu?)colloids and 'imagined' a mixed growth, where
> the attached C-based components (call  them "organic") might have
> exercised greater reactive flexibility  than those we now degrade as
> 'inorganic'. (I just found in Jannie's URL the ref (~2000) to
> carbohydrates as well). So the arsenal of today's 'bios' grew on top of
> the prebiotic claycolloids which even underwent their 'mitosis'
> (cleavage by overgrowth and the formed segments refolding into lower
> free energy formats, with changed reactivities what I call prebiotic
> lifeprocess).

snip

> PS. Dan, is it congruent with your preference? J

I admit I don't know the clay-life origin of life hypotheses at all. But
it sounds from your post that it stills uses cells as the simplest, most
general and original life form - correct me if I am wrong. If so, this
cellular life story would not be congruent with my hunches, which
have an ecosystemic autotroph-heterotroph cycle emerging first, being
the most simple, general and fundamental form of life and this
process generating cells, metabolism and replication much later
after many, many cycles. Cells/organisms are thus subsets or components
of ecosystemic/community life, not independent examples of life in and
of themselves. Thus "why life?" is not the same as "why cells?" but is the
same as "why ecosystems/communities?". The answer to "why cells?"
would then be "because they were generated by ecosystemic/community
life via a process of "encapsulation and miniaturization" (HT Odum's
terms). Thus ecosystems/communities are not super-organisms, but
organisms/cells are sub-ecosystems.

Dan