Theoretical origin of life: no God involved (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 16, 2022, 20:06 (952 days ago) @ David Turell

A very complete essay (4,000 words) of the history of the attempt, with a nod to the lab work:

https://aeon.co/essays/physics-and-information-theory-give-a-glimpse-of-lifes-origins?u...

"...even though experimentalists could show that RNA could act like an enzyme, they typically relied on external enzymes to get the process of replication started. Furthermore, many scientists now think that RNA is so unstable that it couldn’t continue to catalyse reactions and evolve in the extreme temperatures of prebiotic Earth.

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"Challenges to RNA world are but one indication that scientists are far from a consensus about life’s chemical origins. In fact, the lack of consensus seems to be driving scientists to return to hypothetical beginnings and develop radical new hypotheses.

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"For Dyson...he likened the former to computer hardware and the latter to software – hardware, he argued, must come first, but both are essential to the machine. Recalling Shannon, Dyson said that the origin of life is the origin of an information-processing system.

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"David Baum, a botanist and experimental biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, emphasises that in order to understand life’s chemical origins we must do justice to the immense complexity of prebiotic chemical systems. As he explains:

"One of the frustrations for the origins of life field is that people often present it as a single problem, but it’s not. It’s a whole series of separate problems. It wasn’t that life suddenly jumped over this transition from random chemistry to systems with genetics and cells and so forth.

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"It seems possible to Baum that the laws of the Universe necessarily generate life, but the particularities of how chemicals become living systems remain unpredictable. We might say that the early chemistry of life is full of Shannon information – full of surprises.

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"In accordance with England’s theory, life forms increase in complexity not only because they are subject to Darwinian evolution, but also, more fundamentally, because they must improve at dissipating energy. According to England: ‘Thinking about evolution in the language of physics allows us to identify new ways by which adaptations can emerge that do not necessarily require a Darwinian mechanism.’

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"Krakauer shares many of Schrödinger’s views. He thinks that there are many forms of life – that Hamlet, for example, is alive, and that computer viruses and cultural networks might rightly be considered life forms, too. He also thinks that we don’t yet understand the principles of life. I asked Krakauer whether he thought that Schrödinger, in these closing reflections, was a mystic or provocateur or something else. He said that Schrödinger was interested in understanding consciousness and that he wasn’t being mystical with his suggestions. As Krakauer explained: ‘Schrödinger was struggling to find the principles that would unify cultural evolution with organic evolution.’ In short, he, too, was seeking broader principles of life.

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"When we look at the work in origins of life from the time of Darwin on, we see that the field is astonishingly resilient – perhaps not unlike the emergent life systems that it studies. When it hits a dead end, it spontaneously reconceives of itself. The theoretical frameworks that animate its research have adapted Darwin’s thinking in myriad ways, and now they’re moving beyond Darwin into new theoretical frames.

"These frames make us pay attention to life in different ways. When we recognise the universal ways that matter organises and replicates; when we entertain the possibility that the transmission of information across computational and cultural systems can mark the emergence of life; when we turn to the biosphere as a living system, we begin to look for life in places that often seem inanimate. We look for signs of life in the outer planets or in the interstices of rocks and ice; or we see life replicating in the iterative tapestries of culture. We look for ways that life surprises us. It almost seems as though life emerges precisely when our ideas about it begin to conform to the phenomenon that we are attempting to conceive."

Comment: what is obvious is that all of the biological systems in life must work in coordinated concert, that is irreducibly complex and therefore all must be deigned at once to work together in the simplest bacteria. I've left out a few of the theories. Read the essay for completeness.