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Fig. 13.2 The temporal
evolution of RNA fragments
obeying the death function,
Eq.
13.1
13.2 The Conformon Model of the Origin of Life
Frustrations embedded in multicomponent physical systems including primitive
RNA molecules embody both sequence
information
and mechanical
energy
, but
Anderson and coworkers utilized only the
sequence information
in synthesizing
complementary RNA fragments (see Fig.
13.1
), thereby satisfying the
symbolic
aspect
of Pattee's principle of
matter-symbol complementarity
(Pattee 1969, 1996;
Ji 1999b) but not the energetic aspect. Consequently Anderson's model did not
capitalize the mechanical (or conformational) energy associated with (or stored in)
frustrations embedded in RNA to drive the synthesis of polymers. Anderson had to
assume that “energy-rich” monomers, that is, 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 belonging to the three different molecular classes - a
base, a sugar, and an inorganic phosphate.
To overcome what I believed to be the deficiency of the Anderson model of the
origin of biological information (“deficient” from the perspective of the
matter-
symbol complementarity
), I modified the Anderson model by utilizing not only the
sequence information
(as he did) but also the
conformational energy
stored in
frustrations (which he ignored). This is tantamount to assuming that the
frustrations
embedded in RNA molecules are
conformons
(sequence-specific conformational
strains) (Ji 2000). The resulting
conformon-based
model of the origin of biological
information (see Fig.
13.3
) was named “the Princetonator” to reflect the facts (1)
that it is an example of self-organizing chemical reaction-diffusion systems (as
indicated by the suffix, -
ator
) and (2) that it is an extended version of the model
of the origin of biological information originally proposed by Anderson and his
