Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I'm gonna....
The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 13 Oct 1998
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1167

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

------------------------------------------------------------------------------