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What is the mystery? Perhaps one handedness was just first by chance and won because it self replicated the other handedness away by consuming it as food.

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griffzhowl 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, that's the question isn't it? Is it just a frozen accident, or is there some nonarbitrary reason for the left-handed molecules to be favoured?

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throwawaymaths 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure but that might be an unknowable problem. What if the difference in likelihood were 60/40.

You could go down all sorts of rabbit holes and none of them would truly be falsifiable unless you observed an enantiomeric lifeform on some distant planet.

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madaxe_again 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps aliens eat right handed life, but left handed life is poison to them.

Seriously. It would be a pretty good selector, and said “alien” need be no more than a snippet of RNA - and it would be entirely gone from earth now, eliminated by us sinister life forms.

The only evidence would be the ubiquitous absence of R-entantiomers in life.

I think I might be lifting from Asimov - The Left Hand of the Electron.

	▲	Terr_ 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That kinda kicks the can down the road though, because we are faced with almost the same set of questions except about the hypothetical alien life.

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alganet 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That assumption is even more mysterious.

Why one specific handedness "won"? What caused the other one to be food? How can we be sure it was by chance?

Lots of questions.

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throwawaymaths 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

(Comsuming enantiomers and pooping out metabolic fragments in its native chirality)