It is important to notice that this is very different from the mechanism of chemical evolution. Kauffman and Dyson, it will be remembered, have shown that the probability of a spontaneous transition from chaos to order is increasing with the complexity of the system, but in this case the order (or antichaos) is not a result of natural conventions and has nothing to do with organic codes.
This tells us that chemical evolution was really different from postchemical evolution. In the course of chemical evolution, the jump of primitive metabolic systems from chaos to order was only an question of statistical probability and energy conditions. During postchemical evolution, instead, a new type of antichaos appeared, an order that was based on conventional rules of correspondence between two independent molecular worlds, and it was from these first natural conventions that the genetic code finally emerged.

The ribotype concept

We have seen that the RNAs and ribonucleoproteins of a living system have been collectively defined as the ribotype of the system (Barbieri, 1981). In the paper which introduced that concept, however, it was explicitly stated that the new term had a deeper meaning, because it was representing a new cell category. If the term ribotype would only indicate a chemical class of molecules, we could call glycotype the carbohydrates, or lipotype the fatty acids, but we would not have new categories. Sugars, fats and proteins, in fact, take all part in cell metabolism and belong to the same category, i.e. to the phenotype.
With the ribotype, instead, we have a molecular family whose role is qualitatively different from those of the traditional categories. As phenotype is the seat of metabolism, and genotype the seat of heredity, so ribotype is the seat of the genetic code. The distinction between phenotype, genotype and ribotype reflects therefore the distinction between energy, information and meaning, the most fundamental of nature’s quantities.