Monday, July 9, 2007

New NAS Report on Astrobiology & Abiogenesis

**Update: Carl Zimmer remarks on this in the NYT
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A new National Academies of Sciences publication, The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems, can be read for free in HTML at the site, or downloaded as a .pdf after login. The executive summary may be downloaded here as a .pdf (and the entire book here as a .pdf (1.1MB), if you're too lazy to login and do it yourself). I'm reposting some earlier material on abiogenesis, evolution and the origin of the genetic code below, with updated links that were previously broken.
Repost:

I have compiled a very useful list of papers (continually revised), covering abiogenesis, the evolution of genetic information, the origin of the genetic code, and human evolution. I will list some of those papers below.

For more on the evolution of information in the genome:
  1. Natural selection as the process of accumulating genetic information in adaptive evolution, M. Kimura, Genetic Research Cambridge, 2 (1961) 127-140
  2. Rate of Information Acquisition by a Species subjected to Natural Selection, D.J.C. MacKay, open-source @ http://arxiv.org/, (1999)
  3. Evolution of biological information, T.D. Schneider, Nucleic Acids Research, (2000), 2794-2799
  4. The fitness value of information, C.T. Bergstrom and M. Lachmann, open-source @ http://arxiv.org/, (2006)
  5. Review of W. Dembski’s No Free Lunch, J. Shallit, BioSystems, 66 (2002) 93-99
  6. The Evolution and Understanding of Hierarchical Complexity in Biology from an Algebraic Perspective, C.L. Nehaniv and J.L. Rhodes, Artificial Life, 6 (2000) 45–67
  7. On the Increase in Complexity in Evolution I, P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 63 (1976) 375-384
  8. On the Increase in Complexity in Evolution II: The Relativity of Complexity and the Principle of Minimum Increase, P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho, Journal of Theoretical Biology, 90 (1981) 515-530
In addition to these papers, I wanted to highlight six other recent reviews that give a great overview of the present scientific thinking towards the origin of the genetic code:
  1. "Selection, history and chemistry: the three faces of the genetic code.", Trends in Biochemical Sciences, Volume 24, Issue 6, 1 June 1999, Pages 241-247 (full-text .pdf)
  2. "Genetic code: Lucky chance or fundamental law of nature?", Physics of Life Reviews, Volume 1, Issue 3, Dec 2004, Pages 202-229 (full-text .pdf) [low-quality pub, but expansive overview of the subject]
  3. "Stepwise Evolution of Nonliving to Living Chemical Systems.", Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, Volume 34, Issue 4, Aug 2004, Pages 371–389 (full-text .pdf)
  4. "The Origin of Cellular Life.", Bioessays, Volume 22, Issue 12, Dec 2004, Pages 1160-1170 (full-text .pdf)
  5. "The Origin of the Genetic Code: Theories and Their Relationships, A Review.", Biosystems, Volume 80, Issue 2, May 2005, Pages 175-184 (full-text .pdf)
  6. "The Origin and Evolution of the Genetic Code: Statistical and Experimental Investigations.", Robin D. Knight, Ph.D. Dissertation, June 2001.
And three more about evolution and complexity:
  1. Understanding the recent evolution of the human genome: insights from human-chimpanzee genome comparisons, Human Mutation, 28(2):99-130, Oct 2006, Download PDF
  2. The origin of new genes: Glimpses from the young and old, Nature Reviews Genetics, 4(11): 865-875 Nov 2003, Download PDF
  3. Evolution of biological complexity, PNAS, 97(9):4463-4468, April 2000, Download PDF
No one pretends that all questions are sufficiently answered within the complex topics surrounding abiogenesis and the evolution of life. But to pretend that there are no answers is to engage in self-deception.
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