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

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

Cooper, Geoffrey, et al. Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells: iCHELLs. Angewandte Chemie. Online September, 2011. Researchers from corresponding author Lee Cronin’s University of Glasgow laboratory show how polyoxometalates (POM) clusters of tungsten, phosphorous, oxygen, and other elements, if mixed in a saline solution, appear to spontaneously assemble themselves into spherical forms. As Cronin notes in his talk above, the work could stand as a latter day Stanley Miller experiment. The resulting unit is a hybrid inorganic chemical cell or iCHELL. By varying their metal oxide content, cell-like membranes appear, along with inklings of self-replication. The POM agglomerates then exhibit an enhanced functionality with redox, catalytic, photochemical, and magnetic properties. For a review of this frontier work, see “Life-like Cells are Made of Metal” in the New Scientist for September 14, 2011.

The grand aim is to construct complex chemical cells with life-like properties, because the development of non-biotic inorganic chemical cells could be one route to probe how life emerged from the “inorganic world” around 4.3 billion years ago.

Coveney, Peter, et al. Theory, Modelling and Simulation in Origin of Life Studies.. Chemical Society Reviews. 41/5430, 2012. Reviewed more in The Origin of Life, another essay that proceeds to join living systems with an innately self-organizing cosmos.

Cronin, Leroy. Hybrid-Chemo-Robotic Systems for Embodied Chemical Evaluation. Sayama, Hiroki, et al, eds. ALIFE14: Proceedings 14th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. A keynote by the University of Glasgow chemist (search here and LC lab site) about an inherently organic, life generating, natural cosmos being revealed by the latest findings. The whole large volume is free online at the publisher’s site and is filled with similar contributions and confirmations.

How did chemistry turn into biology and what is the role of evolution in the emergence of life and the design of ALIFE? I will discuss how the fields of chemistry, robotics, computer science are coming together to explore this problem viewing the assembly of life as a chemical-computational problem embodied in a non-conventional ‘hetrotic’ computing architecture, and using this idea to search for, and design new, artificial life systems.

Cronin, Leroy. The Stuff of Life: Making Matter Come Alive. http://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive.html.. A July 2011 TED presentation by the youthful University of Glasgow Gardiner Professor of Chemistry on findings from his laboratory that physical material may actually be suffused with innate potentials to complexify, enliven and evolve. Indeed, the dichotomy of an ascent from minimal cells to us observers out of a supposedly barren universe begs to be breached, for there ought to be a seamless cosmic continuity. “Inorganic,” non-carbon matter can in fact be found by clever experiments to form an array of rudimentary vesicles, whose shapes “compete” for preferred survival, as if a “molecular Darwinism.” See Cooper, Geoffrey, etal below for a specific reference, and Cronin's Glasgow group at http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/ for many more examples.

With life most characterized by metabolism, bounded units, information, energy flow, and reaction networks, a rise from physics and chemistry to biology and development is inevitable. As a consequence, a “general theory of universal evolution” accrues – we have heard of selfish genes, does this imply “selfish matter?” In closing: “I purpose to you that matter that can evolve is alive, and this gives us the idea of making evolvable matter.” And as I was logging this, a typo popped up – “inforganic.” What a fine surmise it would be to realize and quantify, as a cosmic Copernican revolution, a spontaneous animate procreation, as ever other epoch and culture knows, dynamically graced with incarnate genotype and emergent phenotype.

But there's a problem, because up until maybe a decade ago, we were told that life was impossible and that we were the most incredible miracle in the universe. In fact, we were the only people in the universe. So as a chemist, I wanted to say, "Hold on. What is going on here? Is life that improbable?" And this is really the question. I think that perhaps the emergence of the first cells was as probable as the emergence of the stars. And in fact, let's take that one step further. Let's say that if the physics of fusion is encoded into the universe, maybe the physics of life is as well. Lee Cronin

D'Eugenio, Francesco, et al. JADES: Carbon enrichment 350 Myr after the Big Bang in a gas-rich galaxy.. arXiv:2311.09908.. As the awesome Webb telescope continues to send a stream of fantastic images from the outmost reaches, UK, USA, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain report an even deeper probe into the onset appearance of metallic elements and compounds which can then engender a prebiotic milieu. Into 2024, might we be reaching a critical moment of actually confirming an inherent organic, fertile milieu?

Finding the first generation of metals in the early Universe and identifying their origin is an important goal of modern astrophysics. In regard, we report deep JWST/NIRSpec spectroscopy of a GS-z12 galaxy as the most distant detection of a metal transition and redshift via emission lines. We derive a super-solar carbon-to-oxygen ratio higher than the C/O measured in galaxies discovered by JWST, and higher than Type-II supernovae enrichment. Such a high C/O in a galaxy observed 350 Myr after the Big Bang may be explained by the yields of metal poor stars, and may even be the heritage of the first generation of supernovae from Population III progenitors. (Excerpt)

The appearance of the first galaxies marks a key phase transition of the Universe with the start of stellar nucleosynthesis and the diffusion of metals. Extensive theoretical work has been devoted to predicting the properties of the first generation of stars and their supernova yield. The launch of JWST enabled, for the first time, the measurement of the physical properties of galaxies. These are generally understood in terms of decreasing gas metallicity and increasing density, ionisation parameter, temperature and stochasticity of their star-formation histories. (1)

Danchin, Antoine and Agnieszka Sekowska. The Role of Information in Evolutionary Genomics of Bacteria. Caetano-Anolles, Gustavo, ed. Evolutionary Genomics and Systems Biology. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. In the spirit of French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878) who in 1865 presciently called for a unity of biological life with physics and chemistry, Institut Pasteur geneticists seek its elusive achievement by adding to space, time, matter, and energy this missing essential quality. “Information” is thus to be seen as a formidable category in its own right. In regard, a “cenome” as the whole “pan-genomic” complements of a species, along with a “paleome” phase of early horizontal gene sharing, is advanced. A companion article could be “Life’s Demons: Information and Order in Biology” in EMBO Reports (12/6, 2011) by Danchin and Philippe Binder, University of Hawaii Chair of Physics and Astronomy, which takes to task the mixed metaphor of cellular “machines” in order to, with Addy Pross and others, correct this unproductive contradiction of living, sentient beings with a sterile, moribund physical basis.

Davies, Paul. Physics and the Mind of God. Driessen, Alfred and Antoine Suarez, eds. Mathematical Undecidability, Quantum Nonlocality and the Question of the Existence of God. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997. An integration of an evolutionary cosmology with complexity theories supports an organic cosmos suffused with signs of order and purpose.

The emergence of life and consciousness, I maintain, are written into the laws of the universe in a very basic way. (199)

De Duve, Christian. Life as a Cosmic Imperative? Proceedings of the Royal Society A. 369/620, 2011. In an issue on recent satellite discoveries that augur for a profusion extra-terrestrial life (search Dominik), the Nobel Laureate Belgian biochemist reaffirms his 1995 tome Vital Dust, that “… life is an obligatory manifestation of matter, written into the fabric of the universe, and that there must be many sites of life, perhaps even intelligent life sometimes, in many parts of our galaxy, and in others.” De Duve notes he has wavered at times, but strong evidence for constant evolutionary convergences now convince him of a fertile, emergent cosmos made to develop complex, smart organisms.

de Duve, Christian. Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative. New York: Basic Books, 1995. In this widely-cited work, a Nobel laureate biochemist articulates a organic scenario which is seemingly made for life and people.

The universe is not the inert cosmos of the physicists, with a little life added for good measure. The universe is life, with the necessary infrastructure around; it consists foremost of trillions of biospheres generated and sustained by the rest of the universe. (292-93) If the universe is not meaningless, what is its meaning? For me, this meaning is to be found in the structure of the universe, which happens to be such as to produce thought by way of life and mind. Thought, in turn, is a faculty whereby the universe can reflect upon itself, discover its own structure, and apprehend such immanent entities as truth, beauty, goodness and love. (301)

Denton, Michael. Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. New York: Free Press, 1998. This well-written, unique work by the University of Otago, New Zealand, biochemist achieves a rarest perspective on the appearance and rise of life akin to Yale biologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson (1903-1991). A large first step is the admission of a greater evolutionary creation with its own drive and developmental course, a view now banished and scorned. But rather than an “anthropic principle” teased out of cosmic parameters, a “biotropic” version can robustly arise from the myriad, constellated properties of energy and matter as they serve to spawn proteins and people. By any measure, the 100 elements of the Periodic Table are ideally suited for regnant life and mind to occur. The water molecule, carbon compounds, gas properties, the DNA helix, cellular organisms, and so on are all special beyond any coincidence. Darwinian descent is quite insufficient, and sans Divine intervention, these innate lawful propensities beg to be seen and appreciated as made for human-like beings to appear. See also his 2016 entry Evolution: still a Theory in Crisis, not whether it happened, but about its interpretation.

Denton, Michael, et al. Cells as Irreducible Wholes: The Failure of Mechanism and the Possibility of an Organicist Revival. Biology & Philosophy. Online September, 2011. Denton, the University of Otago microbiologist and author, now at the Adiya Jyot Eye Hospital, Mumbai, continues his mission to set aside an old mechanical fixation and paradigm unable to express life’s intrinsic fertile vitality. Joined by Govindasamy Kumaramanickavel of Adiya Jyot, and Michael Legge of Otago, the present paper is a thorough attempt to articulate an overdue, imperative revolution to appreciate life, via the archetypal cell, not in machine or industrial terms, but by truly organic and developmental imagery.

According to vitalism, living organisms differ from machines and all other inanimate objects by being endowed with an indwelling immaterial directive agency, ‘vital force,’ or entelechy. While support for vitalism fell away in the late nineteenth century many biologists in the early twentieth century embraced a non vitalist philosophy variously termed organicism/holism/emergentism which aimed at replacing the actions of an immaterial spirit with what was seen as an equivalent but perfectly natural agency—the emergent autonomous activity of the whole organism. Organicists hold that organisms unlike machines are ‘more than the sum of their parts’ and predict that the vital properties of living things can never be explained in terms of mechanical analogies and that the reductionist agenda is doomed to failure. Here we review the current status of the mechanist and organicist conceptions of life particularly as they apply to the cell. We argue that despite the advances in biological knowledge over the past six decades since the molecular biological revolution, especially in the fields of genetics and cell biology the unique properties of living cells have still not been simulated in mechanical systems nor yielded to reductionist—analytical explanations. And we conclude that despite the dominance of the mechanistic–reductionist paradigm through most of the past century the possibility of a twenty first century organicist revival cannot be easily discounted. (Abstract)

We saw above that the cell contains an interconnected and highly integrated network of nodes or switches or signaling complexes equivalent to the knots of Indra’s net in which the state of each individual signaling complex is determined by a vast ‘collection of inputs’ from other complexes, amounting in the end to a ‘collective’ input from the entire functioning whole cell. Intriguingly the network of synaptic connections in the cerebral cortex of higher mammals shares many similarities with the intracellular network of interconnected signaling and other complexes in the cell.

Dick, Steven. Extraterrestrial Life and Our World View at the Turn of the Millennium. www.sil.si.edu/silpublications/dibner-library-lectures/extraterrestrial-life/index.htm. A Dibney Library Lecture given on May 2, 2000 by the NASA historian of science proposes that a new, expanded Copernican revolution appears underway between two prime versions of the universe as a physical mechanism or fundamentally biological in kind, similar to the geocentric to heliocentric shift in the Middle Ages. Such a vista and advance between older material machine or nascent organic genesis well defines a “clash of cosmologies” today that underlies, skews and influences everything else.

These two world systems, which I shall call the physical universe and the biological universe, result in vastly different implications for science, for society, and for human destiny. I say they are mutually exclusive because the emphasis is on the endpoint of cosmic evolution. Either that endpoint is lifeless matter and forever in the realm of physics, or it is living organisms and in the very different realm of biology; the separation of the quick from the dead is sharply drawn, and has been since the origin of life. Of course the biological universe still has the physical universe as its substratum, and life evolves from the physical universe. But the two outcomes of cosmic evolution are so different that in my opinion they must be given the status of different world views.

And, if the biological universe is proven true in the strong sense I have defined here, it has the potential to become much more than that: the universal system of thought of which our science, our art, religion, philosophy and history-in short, our knowledge and belief-are but specific instances of the manifestations of intelligence in the universe. In short, the biological universe will affect our world view at many levels, no less than the geocentric cosmos did for Dante's contemporaries, and the heliocentric cosmos did for Galileo's, even though the full scope of the Copernican revolution was unfulfilled then, and remains so today.

Previous   1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10  Next  [More Pages]