Chicken or egg? Pursuing historical context

Abstract

Chicken or egg? Pursuing historical context Charles W Carter Jr, Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explores prebiotic processes from the historical context enabling the emergence of translation. Many vexing problems surround how information first flowed at the origin of life. None is more self-evident than the question, which came first: genes or proteins? Like Zeno’s paradoxes, the question hides an intellectual sleight-of-hand rooted in our limited perception of time. Darwin’s singular accomplishment was to articulate how genetic variation and selection connect different biological species in time. Both variation and selection arise from an enabling past. They also update that milieu, enabling subsequent evolutionary change. That insight ties the resolution of the paradox explicitly to historical context. De Grasse Tyson answered the underlying question crisply: “The egg was laid by a bird that was not a chicken”.(1) His reasoning applies perforce to molecular evolution.