Emergence of Animals from Heat Engines – Part 1. Before the Snowball Earths

Entropy

关键词: evolution;    flagellar motor;    Feynman’s ratchet;    non-equilibrium thermodynamics;    Reynolds Number;    Snowball Earth;    thermosynthesis;    Turing machine;   

DOI  :  10.3390/e11030463

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The origin of life has previously been modeled by biological heat engines driven by thermal cycling, caused by suspension in convecting water. Here more complex heat engines are invoked to explain the origin of animals in the thermal gradient above a submarine hydrothermal vent. Thermal cycling by a filamentous protein ‘thermotether’ was the result of a temperature-gradient induced relaxation oscillation not impeded by the low Reynolds number of a small scale. During evolution a ‘flagellar proton pump’ emerged that resembled Feynman’s ratchet and that turned into today’s bacterial flagellar motor. An emerged ‘flagellar computer’ functioning as Turing machine implemented chemotaxis.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2009 by the authors; licensee Molecular Diversity Preservation International, Basel, Switzerland.