# Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I'm gonna.... *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 13 Oct 1998* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Charles Dye *13 Oct 1998, 17:56* The Spectacled Bear in RNA World: > I do know what Kieran meant about RNA, though: there was a theory > around for a while that RNA was the carrier of memory. Back in the > 1970's (ish) someone taught planarian worms to run a T-shaped maze, > then fed them to other planarian worms, and put those worms into > the maze. They appeared to guess which way to turn more often than > chance would allow. There naturally followed a lot of stories based > on that, often making much of the cannibal belief that you could > absorb your enemies' strength and other virtues by eating them. This > account is taken from what I recall of the introduction to one such > story, so it may not be scientifically or historically accurate, but > it reflects the author's understanding, which is what matters here. > The experiment seemed to suggest that memory must be carried chemically > (cell structures wouldn't survive being ground up and eaten) and RNA > was a favorite contender for the role. I believe the theory has gone > away now, though. I've heard about this too. In the original experiment, the second set of worms did a far better job of solving the maze than the first group. However, it turns out that if you *wash* the maze between the first and second sets of worms, the second group does no better than the first -- whether they eat their predecessors or no. So yes, that theory "has gone away." raster at highfiber.com ---