Nick Szabo  🔑

@NickSzabo4 @cinnamon_carter If it appeared before, how could you ever know? The bombardment censors observations. That was what I meant.

@gwern @cinnamon_carter We should reason from what we know: chemical abilities of metabolisms and the genomic complexities those require.

@NickSzabo4 @cinnamon_carter It's still unclear if 'genomes' proper are needed or if RNA World (or pre-RNA!) didn't do both simultaneously.

@gwern @cinnamon_carter The issue is the complexity needed to encode, whether in RNA or DNA, metabolic functions.

@NickSzabo4 @cinnamon_carter The issue is assumption length must follow a exact linear form extrapolated back 9bya from present-day data.

@gwern @NickSzabo4 If most depend on the previous this is a logical method to begin, at least as a baseline.

@cinnamon_carter @gwern +1 It's just a simple way to formalize the general idea that evolution proceeds gradually, not by miraculous leaps.

@cinnamon_carter @gwern And follow gradualism all the way back to origins. If anybody has a better model that does that let's hear about it.

@gwern @cinnamon_carter However crude their model, their willingness to tackle the genomic complexity issue is a huge step forward.

@NickSzabo4 @cinnamon_carter A model that bad sheds more heat than light. What good is it to plot some points and draw a line backwards?

@gwern @cinnamon_carter At least a bad model is a model, and thus far better than hand-waving about "rich soups", "open niches", etc. etc.

@NickSzabo4 @cinnamon_carter As opposed to ignoring all the evidence that genome lengths have nothing to do with time and are about niches?

@NickSzabo4 @cinnamon_carter Consider the genome lengths themselves. We don't have prokaryote DNA from 3bya; the paper's data is from *now*.

@gwern @cinnamon_carter We have fossil evidence for ecosystem w/many similar chemical abilities as prokaryotes => ~ genetic complexity.

@NickSzabo4 @cinnamon_carter I don't follow? We don't have any DNA sequenced from more than a few hundred million years, AFAIK

@NickSzabo4 @cinnamon_carter So I'm pretty sure we can't compare genome length of 1bya+ prokaryotes to current ones.