Defining life: reductionist physics does not work (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 22, 2020, 19:39 (1493 days ago) @ David Turell

Comment: The author's point is simple. Life is a emergent event=, which cannot be explained by reductionism and that applies to all thought about the origin of life.

Who is Jeremy England:

http://nautil.us/issue/92/frontiers/the-physicists-new-book-of-life?mc_cid=ab3f23e2c9&a...

"He is a biochemistry graduate who became an MIT assistant professor in physics when he was 29 years old. He is an ordained rabbi. He is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. He is a descendant of the first life-form on Earth. He can also be described as an assemblage of atoms that exhibits complex, life-like behavior. England might describe himself as one of the many dissipators of energy in the universe—this, he says, seems to be a useful way to answer the question that humans have asked for so many millennia: What is life, and how did it arise?

"This question—and England’s answer—form the basis of his new book Every Life Is On Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origin of Living Things, which explores the idea that burning up energy is the base activity of life. But England has no simple, neat tale to tell: This is a complex, multilayered subject, and must be treated as more than a scientific issue, he says. That’s why Every Life Is On Fire daringly brings ideas from the Hebrew Scriptures and uses them to unpack the science. Cultural and religious traditions have long been exploring this territory, he says, and can complement scientific angles on the question of where we ultimately came from. If we really want to understand ourselves, he suggests, we’ll need more than science.

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"Energy harvesting is central to your ideas. You suggest a key aspect of life’s emergence is down to structures that adapt to their environment by dissipating energy. Can you elaborate on that?

"Imagine I have a collection of matter under the influence of an environment. The environment is essentially sources of energy that are kicking the matter and knocking into it and allowing it to change shape. I’m interested in which configurations of that matter will be likely to exist at some point in the future. That likelihood depends, in part, on how much extra energy was absorbed and dissipated on the way. Over the course of the whole history of the system, highly dissipative histories are going to lead to highly likely outcomes.

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"What’s the general idea of dissipative adaptation?

"There’s a feedback process that’s positive: I end up in a particular place because I was in a state in my past that was good at absorbing energy and it carried me irreversibly in a certain direction that I can’t go back from. It left its mark. So the general idea with dissipative adaptation is that the current state of the system holds the signature of how I had to be in some special state in my past to absorb a lot of energy. That helped me change my shape in consequential ways. Sometimes that leads to growing energy absorption over time, and sometimes it leads to extinction of energy absorption over time. And both of those things can leave very noticeable fingerprints that are different aspects of lifelike behavior.

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"I’m a practicing religious Jew—I’m an ordained Orthodox rabbi—and I care very deeply about these things. So I would feel foolish putting the scientific ideas out there but not making my own comment about a larger conversation that includes more perspectives on what some of this could mean. When I decided to write this book, I quickly realized I wanted to go and look in the Torah and see if I can find a commentary that responds to what I’m already thinking about with the science. I certainly think that it’s possible to contemplate the boundary between life and not-life from that perspective, and the text, I would argue, clearly contains such a contemplation."

Comment: I love his approach!!! Note the emphasis on the energy supply which I constantly bring up as ecosystems. Available energy drives life.