SoylentNews

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Physics is filled with papers where the authors don't actually do anything—at least not anything empirical. Instead, they explore the math behind a topic and try to gain new theoretical insights, leaving it to someone else to find out whether their insights are actually reflected in the behavior of the real world.

But physics doesn't have a monopoly on this, and there have been plenty of papers in biology that are filled with math and explore how a theoretical population would behave. One area where that's had a big impact on thinking has been in studying the origin of life, where researchers have been struggling to understand how a set of simple self-copying molecules could make their way towards something that looks more like a cell. Now, two Japanese researchers have taken some of these theoretical ideas and shown they can hold in an actual biochemical system.

[...] But if simulations identified the problem, they've also helped us identify a potential solution: cells. By dividing up a large population of self-replicating molecules, cells increase the odds that that some of the small, divided populations will replicate without any disabling mutations. Because each cell is competing against all the others, the ones that are able to go on replicating will eventually outcompete their peers.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/researchers-get-two-rna-molecules-to-cooperate-evolve/

Original Submission