ABSTRACT

A heavy emphasis on replication and Darwinian competition, inherited from evolutionary biology, has sent molecular investigations of the origin of life in search of molecular individuals to impose biological information “from the top down”, while under-emphasizing the role of molecular systems. 

A function-oriented historical reconstruction of the deep history of biochemistry and bioenergetics, growing out of planetary science, suggests a very different abstraction. In it, the nature of life is carried on ecosystems and the whole biosphere, and the emergence of a biosphere is a stage in planetary chemical maturation. Much of the essential “information” of life flows from the bottom up in the form of constraints, through small-molecule networks to higher-level organizations, and that bottom-up information is a necessary pre-condition to make conventional biological evolution possible.

Whether the origin of life on Earth was improbable or inevitable, and how much it could have been different, will be answered by showing how much living information must have come bottom-up from constraints, in order for life to have emerged at all. Recent advances in geochemistry, bioinformatics, and studies of biopolymers suggest several entropy-rejecting stages that were essential for Earth’s life. Concepts fundamental to our theory of the hierarchy of matter, such as the role of phases of matter, will need to become core concepts in biology as well to create a scientific theory of the origin and nature of life.

BIO
Eric Smith is a Professor and Principle Investigator of the Earth-Life Science Institute in the Tokyo Institute of Technology, a Senior Research Scientist in the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

His research concerns the origin of life as a phenomenon in planetary geochemistry, and major transitions in living structure and evolution. His approach is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on biochemistry and geochemistry, evolutionary biology, and computational modeling, but also incorporating fundamental concepts of robustness, complexity, and error correction from modern physics, computer science, and control theory. 

Smith was trained in Physics and Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (B.S.) and the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D.). Much of his current research philosophy was formed during eleven years in residence at the Santa Fe Institute, where he remains an affiliated professor. At SFI, in addition to the origin of life and evolution, his research topics included financial and institutional economics, statistical physics, biophysics, and historical linguistics and semantics.

Smith is the co-author, with Harold Morowitz, of The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere (Cambridge U. Press, 2016); with Supriya Krishnamurthy, of Symmetry and Collective Fluctuations in Evolutionary Games (Institute of Physics Press, 2015); and with Martin Shubik, of The Guidance of an Enterprise Economy (MIT Press, 2016).