Status Updates From The Origin and Nature of Li...

The plausible continuity from minerals to modern enzymes leads us to characterize the emergence of metabolism as an 'enfolding' of geochemical mechanisms in organic control systems, as much as the creation of a genuinely novel system.

The fact that carbon fixation is not only simple, but that it is simple in this way - with explicit links to minerals and the periodic table - leads us to propose that the same set of constraints can have been both causes of limited evolutionary innovation in the world of moderns cells, and yet common to the cellular world and back through pre-cellular life and protometabolism to prebiotic geochemistry.

Many motifs of apparently chemical origin in metabolism are recapitulated in higher-level systems such as the genetic code.

The central role and high concentration of phosphorus in biochemistry is disproportionate to its availability in most geochemical settings on Earth today. There are good reasons that no other chemical group may be able to do what phosphorus does in biochemistry, but its inevitability alone does not address the problem of either obtaining it or using it as a vehicle of disequilibrium.

The role of heredity and selection in population processes is mathematically identical to the role of Bayesian updating in certain problems of optimal inference. It is so general that one level it describes everything, and for the same reason it inherently describes nothing in particular.

An important and interesting question, which we do not know how to answer, is whether the geological activity on Earth today, and the subsystem of the biosphere supported by means of it, continues to be essential to maintaining the biosphere as whole, including its phototrophic constituencies.

Almost all hydrogen outside the litosphere today is bound in water. To escape it must first be unbound by UV photolysis, which occurs in the stratosphere. The existence of a liquid reservoir of water in the ocean, and of condensation at the top of the troposhere keeps the stratosphere dry and limits the delivery of hydrogen to the exobase. Condensation in turn depends on the Earth's being sufficiently cool.

The actual structure of the life we know is deeply and pervasively anchored in the particularities of the periodic table. If one wishes to propose an abstraction of 'life' away from its chemical substrate, one should first consider seriously the depth of this embedding, and should ask, if the chemical particulars were removed, how much of the structure we think of as living would remain to be abstracted.

Constraints on ecological function are more central to the earliest stages of biogenesis than most properties of organisms, and the ecosystem is the proper level of aggregation to recognize as the bridge from geochemistry to life.

A typological classification based on the directions of electron flow in metabolism reveals the greatest simplicity in the grouping of organisms. The same classification criteria apply at the ecosystem level, where they reveal greater universality than they do at the level of species.

Just as functions within computer science, ecosystems must become first-class citizens in biology.

Argument for parallelism: the origin of life was not so much the creation of an autonomous system to which complexity was added, as it was the gathering of dispersed and heterogeneous mechanisms of order formation in geo-chemistry, into a system where their progressive integration and interdependence gradually made then autonomous.

Life emerged early from a less stable planetary condition devoid of life, and into a more stable condition that includes a biosphere. In entropic terms, this transition was still a 'collapse' from an improbable to a more probable phase, but the stable phase in this case was the dynamically ordered living state.

Even the appellation 'living things' assumes a category error: life is not a property inherent in things so much as things are instantiations of organizational states that arise within a larger context of life.

The strength of reductionism is due to the simplifying effects of emergence. For the same mathematical reason, the emergence of a biosphere could only have been possible through a cascade of phases that buffered innovations at different levels from each other. If we can identify the transitions, we recognize the stages as lawful rather than accidental.

We believe that any effort to separate what is chance in life from what is necessity, and to distinguish the patterns that reflect each, must eventually face questions of robustness and the relation between material and information, which will bring non-equilibrium mechanics and structurally rich systems together to create a new frontier.

For human minds in society, professional disciplines have been the portals to expertise, but the emergence of the biosphere was not a respecter of human silos.

The application of formal principles of stability from non-equilibrium statistical mechanics to systems chemistry is a field currently in its infancy, bringing together complex suites of concepts from two already sophisticated fields. Yet it is an inevitable merger, because the emergence of the biosphere was not a compounding of misadventures but a restructuring of systems.