III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

A. UniVerse Alive: An Organic, Self-Made, Encoded, Familial Procreativity

Veras, Dimitri, et al. Dynamical and Biological Panspermia Constraints within Multi-Planet Exosystems. arXiv:1802.04279. We note this entry by a six person group from the University of Warwick, Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability, and the University of Toronto, Centre for Planetary Sciences because it well quantifies a true cosmic organic essence. A natural fertility seems made to develop into and spread living biochemical matter everywhere as if some placental, amniotic milieu.

As discoveries of multiple planets in the habitable zone of their parent star mount, developing analytical techniques to quantify extrasolar intra-system panspermia will become increasingly important. Here, we provide user-friendly prescriptions that describe the asteroid impact characteristics which would be necessary to transport life both inwards and outwards within these systems within a single framework. Our focus is on projectile generation and delivery and our expressions are algebraic, eliminating the need for the solution of differential equations. We derive a probability distribution function for life-bearing debris to reach a planetary orbit, and describe the survival of micro-organisms during planetary ejection, their journey through interplanetary space, and atmospheric entry. (Abstract)

Wachtershauser, Gunter. Chemoautotrophic Origin of Life: The Iron-Sulfur World Hypothesis. Barton, Barry, et al. Geomicrobiology: Molecular and Environmental Perspectives. Dordrecht: Springer, 2010. Reviewed at length in The Origin of Life as an extraordinary witness of an earthly materiality which seems made to engender a biological, quickening development.

Wandel, Wandel, Amri and Joseph Gale. The Biohabitable Zone and Atmospheric Properties for Planets of Red Dwarfs. arXiv:1907.11098. We cite this entry by Hebrew University of Jerusalem life scientists in An Organic Universe as a good example, if of a mind to perceive, of how vitally biochemical and evolutionary an ecosmic nature actually is. By this study and many others, every kind of stellar system may be deeply conducive for life to complexity and develop. Might we worldwise peoples at last be able to realize that the universe is not a mechanism or computation, rather by its own inherency possesses an innate biological fertility. For a popular, illustrated article on Red Dwarfs see Life as We Don’t Know It by Igor Palubski and Aomana Shields in Sky & Telescope for August 2019.

The Kepler data show that habitable small planets orbiting Red Dwarf stars (RDs) are abundant, and hence might be promising targets to look at for biomarkers and life. It is shown that temperatures suitable for liquid water and even organic molecules may exist on tidally locked planets of RDs. We chart the surface temperature distribution as a function of the irradiation, greenhouse factor and heat circulation. We find that tidally locked as well as not locked planets of RDs and K-type stars may support life for a wider range of orbital distance and atmospheric conditions than previously thought. We show that when the effect of continuous radiation is taken into account, the Photo-synthetically Active Radiation (PAR) available on tidally locked planets, even of RDs, could produce a high Potential Plant Productivity, in analogy to mid-summer growth at high latitudes on Earth. (Abstract excerpt)

Westall, Frances and Andre Brack. The Importance of Water for Life. Space Science Reviews. 214/2, 2018. A lead article for a Delivery of Water to Protoplanets, Planets and Satellites issue by CNRS-Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire, France astrobiologists which presents a 23 page illustrated survey of a universe “pregnant with life” as the Nobel chemist Christian de Duve, as cited in the Abstract, famously advised. Into these later 2010s, evidence robustly builds for a cosmic revolution able to imagine an innately vital, organic, fertile genesis nature. See also The Delivery of Water during Terrestrial Planet Formation by David O’Brien in this collection.

The elements essential to carbon and water-based life are among the most common in the universe. Carbon molecules and liquid water have physical and chemical properties that make them optimal compound-solvent pairs. Liquid water is essential for prebiotic reactions. But equally important for the emergence of life is the contact of carbon molecules in liquid water with hot rocks and minerals. We here review the environmental conditions of the early Earth, as soon as it had liquid water at its surface and was habitable. Basing our approach to life as a “cosmic phenomenon” (Christian de Duve 1995), i.e. a chemical continuum, we briefly address hypotheses for the origin of life. We continue with the record of early life noting that, by 3.5 Ga, anaerobic life forms had colonized microenvironments from the sea floor to exposed beach environments. We conclude with an evaluation of the potential for habitability and colonisation of other planets and satellites in the Solar System, noting common life forms in the Solar System and probably in the Universe would be similar to terrestrial chemotrophs whose carbon source is either reduced carbon or CO2 dissolved in water and whose energy would be sourced from oxidized carbon, H2, or other transition elements. (Abstract edits)

Wickramasinghe, N. Chandra and Jack Trevors. Non-Terrestrial Origin of Life: A Transformative Research Paradigm Shift. Theory in Biosciences. Online December, 2012. Wickramasinghe is a Sri Lankan-British mathematician, for many years a collaborator with the cosmologist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), and presently Director of the University of Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology. He is joined by a University of Guelph biophysicist to continue his lifetime conviction, with Hoyle, that the occasion of earthly organisms was much from a flow of complex biomolecules that suffuses the cosmic spacescape. Long known as the Panspermia Theory, this view imagines our bioworld as bathed in and “seeded” by such celestial fecundity. They argue that a wealth of 21st century research increasingly bears out and support this perspective. This “cosmic life theory” is seen to imply a universal “cosmic gene pool,” and if fully appreciated will engender a revolutionary vision of an inherently organic universe.

Theories and hypotheses in science are continually subject to verification, critical re-evaluation, revision and indeed evolution, in response to new observations and discoveries. Theories of the origin of life have been more constrained than other scientific theories and hypotheses in this regard, through the force of social and cultural pressures. There has been a tendency to adhere too rigidly to a class of theory that demands a purely terrestrial origin of life. For nearly five decades evidence in favour of a non-terrestrial origin of life and panspermia has accumulated which has not been properly assessed. A point has now been reached that demands the serious attention of biologists to a possibly transformative paradigm shift of the question of the origin of life, with profound implications across many disciplines. (Abstract)

Wills, Peter. Genetic Information, Physical Interpreters and Thermodynamics: The Material-Informatic Basis of Biosemiosis. Biosemiotics. Online October, 2013. A latest edition by the University of Auckland physicist of his life project (search 2009) to resolve the dichotomy of regnant life and sapient beings and a physical substrate that it yet arose from and must be wholly continuous with. But within this overdue revolution, practitioners remain burdened with terminologies and a mix of old and new features. Thus, the heavy employ of “machine” for vital organisms. On this day when the Nobel Physics Prize was awarded for “the theory of how particles acquire mass,” an olden looking down into matter, back in time, out in space to multiverses is unable to find or admit nature’s propensity to organize itself into vital sentience. Wills, Nigel Goldenfeld, Stuart Kauffman, Manfred Eigen, independent others, grapple at once with how to explain and express an intrinsic “spatio-temporal self-organization” that involves the extent of selective effects. A generative cause with a communicative essence is alluded at original, prior work, but how to integrate with both a mechanical physics and Darwinian biology. While ever other field has made a systems course correction, physics and cosmology remain in denial of any such holistic existence.

The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism’s DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical machine, which the information constrains in such a way as to direct the process of construction. In reality, any biochemical machine for which a DNA codescript is efficacious is itself produced through the mechanical interpretation of an identical or very similar codescript. In these terms the origin of life can be described as a bootstrap process involving the simultaneous accumulation of genetic information and the generation of a machine that interprets it as instructions for its own construction. This problem is discussed within the theoretical frameworks of thermodynamics, informatics and self-reproducing automata, paying special attention to the physico-chemical origin of genetic coding and the conditions, both thermodynamic and informatic, that a system must fulfill in order for it to sustain semiosis. The origin of life is equated with biosemiosis. (Abstract)

One of the most vexing questions in biology and the philosophy of biology is the character of information and its relevance tour understanding of the nature of living systems as physico-chemical entities. Much of the vexation is caused by the multi-faceted character of information, not least its relationship to ‘meaning,’ of which we have immediate experience in language and the perpetual confrontation of multiple interpretations of even the simplest perceptions. Although the manifestation of meaning in the physical universe is inextricably linked to biology, there is little agreement, except within alternative schools of biosemiotic thinking, as to how that link is to be understood. In this paper, a critical analysis of the link between biology and meaning will be attempted from the point of view of the theories of molecular biology, physics and complex systems, especially as they have been applied to the question of the origin of life. (1-2)

The spontaneous emergence of the algorithmically meaning interpretations of information in molecular systems is only possible in self-organized non-equilibrium physical systems whose component structures satisfy certain relational constraints of a purely formal, informatic character. (4) The conclusion reached is that both life and meaning originate in physical systems through a process of information-based self-construction from functionally differentiated component parts. (4)

Yunes, Rosendo. The Evolution of the Human Mind and Logic-Mathematics Structures. Journal of Theoretical Biology. 236/1, 2005. The author describes somewhat abstractly the emergence of ocular vision and intelligent cognition as a result of an innately self-organizing universe. An independent mathematical and informational source is conceived to create and impel complex living systems prior to selection. By this approach, an increase in encephalization, personal autonomy, learning and a reflective sense of self defines an evolutionary trend. (Sentient vision seems to appear in and of the universe as if it were trying to see and to recognize itself.)

Considering the recent developments about the mechanisms of the evolution of living systems we need to incorporate the self-organizational concepts because while natural selection is always at work it does not have the power to generate all the order of biological systems by itself. (98) The physical world, the world of matter, is something that permits logic-mathematics to enter in space and time. This information organizes the universe and is an intrinsic constitutive, irreducible and inseparable part of the physical reality. (99)

Zaikowski, Lori et al, eds. Chemical Evolution II: From the Origins of Life to Modern Society. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, 2009. This second volume is again lucidly introduced by Robert Hazen who avers that after “more than fifty years of research” a consensus has now formed that biomolecular, self-organized animation appears to innately spring from an organically conducive cosmos. Its three evolutionary phases then form the book’s outline: prebiotic, biological and human-directed.

Zewail, Amhed. Physical Biology: 4D Visualization of Complexity. Zewail, Ahmed, ed. Physical Biology: From Atoms to Medicine. London: Imperial College Press, 2008. The Caltech Nobel Laureate chemist surveys this endeavor to “integrate physics and chemistry with biology” due to advances in instrumentation and computer graphics, which can reveal life’s deep rootedness in material realms. The lavish volume contains many papers by leading scientists, so also Leroy Hood and Christoph Koch herein. But the 17 scientist authors are all men. As per the quote, the work exemplifies a present, largely unrecognized, conflation of life’s increasing expanse with a matrix universe that is mechanical in kind. Thus oxymoron phrases such as “microfactory cells” occur, while noted features like self-organization and emergence remain askance because they do not fit the vested moribund model. Philosophical guidance, the second culture, has lately absconded, so a waxing genesis universe remains unnoticed, to our great deficit.

Because the elements of biological machines are defined on the scale of macromolecules, one is concerned with how they interact, communicate, and define a nanometer-scale function. This machinery derives its power from the control it exerts, with atomic-scale precision, which is responsible for the so-called emergence. Emergence is a new addition to the lexicon of biology, and other fields, but its definition is still amorphous. Given that biological machines operate in the nonequilibrium state, irrespective of viewpoint, we have to understand how the pieces are made, how their physical forces exert control, and how feedback and feedforward of elements allow for function and robustness of information flow. (24-25)

Zhegunov, Gennady. The Dual Nature of Life: Interplay of the Individual and the Genome. Berlin: Springer, 2012. From the Frontiers Collection, due around October, the director of the Department of Biochemistry at the Kharkov State Zooveterinary Academy, Ukraine, offers a unique missive whose contents include The Phenomenon of Life, How Life Works, and Invisible World of Information.

Life is a diverse and ubiquitous phenomenon on Earth, characterized by fundamental features distinguishing living bodies from nonliving material. Yet it is also so complex that it has long defied precise definition. This book from a seasoned biologist offers new insights into the nature of life by illuminating a fascinating architecture of dualities inherent in its existence and propagation. Life is connected with individual living beings, yet it is also a collective and inherently global phenomenon of the material world. It embodies a dual existence of cycles of phenotypic life, and their unseen driver — an uninterrupted march of genetic information whose collective immortality is guaranteed by individual mortality. Although evolution propagates and tunes species of organisms, the beings produced can be regarded merely as tools for the survival and cloning of genomes written in an unchanging code. What are the physical versus informational bases and driving forces of life, and how do they unite as an integrated system? What does time mean for individuals, life on the global scale, and the underlying information. (Publisher)

Zhu, Qiang, et al. Chemical Basis of Metabolic Network Organization. PLoS Computational Biology. 7/10, 2011. Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, and Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, researchers are able to link anatomy and physiology with innate biomaterial substrates that living organisms then inevitably arise from.

Although the metabolic networks of the three domains of life consist of different constituents and metabolic pathways, they exhibit the same scale-free organization. This phenomenon has been hypothetically explained by preferential attachment principle that the new-recruited metabolites attach preferentially to those that are already well connected. However, since metabolites are usually small molecules and metabolic processes are basically chemical reactions, we speculate that the metabolic network organization may have a chemical basis. In this paper, chemoinformatic analyses on metabolic networks of Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae were performed. It was found that there exist qualitative and quantitative correlations between network topology and chemical properties of metabolites. The metabolites with larger degrees of connectivity (hubs) are of relatively stronger polarity. This suggests that metabolic networks are chemically organized to a certain extent, which was further elucidated in terms of high concentrations required by metabolic hubs to drive a variety of reactions. (Abstract)

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