Lipids. Why them over RNA? Because they place architecture at the very beginning of all living things. By way of a love/hate relationship with water (a hydrophilic heads and hydrophobic tails), lipids spontaneously assemble a bubble, a separation of the outside from the inside, the internal and from external. This automatic and simple arrangement, let it be the source and house of being. Do not begin with information and communication; begin with an instinct toward architecture.
Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory... More by Charles Mudede
This is an interesting proposition.
Oh, this has great potential: a discussion between Golob and Mudede. Two men who exist in completely different realities. Not necessarily incompatible, but utterly foreign to one another.
I would pay to watch such a discussion.
I want to see Mudede vs. Golob. I would pay to see it.
In the spirit of No Dick Day, I’ll just report recent history:
One friend sent me the link to this post with a sarcastic “I thought you might enjoy. . .”, and another read it to my voicemail and then apologized for the “mind rape”.
So what exactly are you getting at Charles? That self assembly in lipids is somehow central to life by its virtue of being regular and self organizing? That makes no sense — there are plenty of examples of self organization in nature at a much simple level.
An easy example is salt — NaCl forms regular crystals it is “self-organizing” and there is inside and outside. Or even if you want more simple, consider the allotropes of carbon, most notably the Fullerene . That is a structure that has outside and an inside, yet features in no living thing.
And in any case, lipids (and carbon) have no “instincts” towards anything. They just are.
Lipids are my life – and yours too.
Are you familiar with the RNA world hypothesis?