Projects
Origin of life
Ideas
The problem of explaining the origin of life cannot sensibly be
separated from understanding the organization of the biosphere today.
This is a complicated project, because modern life is organized at
many scales according to many kinds of structure and interaction. It
employs chemical, physical-chemical, geometric, and dynamical
organization. It uses rich systems of memory and control, which
apparently emerged spontaneously and are self-maintaining. It
introduces new concepts seldom or never required in the sub-living
world, such as individuality and replication, and new oppositions,
such as organism/environment and individual/ecosystem. Through these
many levels of structure, it introduces unprecedented opportunities
for persistent variation, and with this, a pervasive role for
historical contingency. Explaining the emergence and persistence of a
biosphere on earth requires answering, for each of these forms of
order, "Why is there something instead of nothing?".
For biochemistry, part of the answer may be that the core small
molecules and reactions of life are part of self-organized
geochemistry, around which more complex structure accreted in stages
to constitute the transition to fully complex life. The deep core of
biochemistry, including 300 or so small molecules and the pathways to
synthesize them, is universal throughout known life -- but only at the
ecosystem level -- individual species may implement some of the
reactions and draw from others through the proxy of organic food. The
major innovations affecting this network, such as nitrogen fixation
and various forms of photosynthesis, constitute the major chemical
transitions in evolution. It may be that universal aspects of
biochemistry at the ecosystem level, rather than properties associated
with individuality and replication, reflect the intermediate stages
between lifeless geochemistry and the chemical foundations for the
rest of living complexity.
Links
SFI website for FIBR
Collaborators
