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

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

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.

Dick, Steven, ed. Many Worlds. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000. Several excellent papers explore the scientific and theological implications of the growing realization of a “biological universe” ordained to bring forth intelligent life and spiritual consciousness. Authors include Paul Davies, Jill Tarter, Martin Rees, Christian deDuve and Lee Smolin.

Durrani, Matin. In Praise of Darwin. Physics World. July, 2009. An editorial for a special issue “How Physics is Changing Biology,” which contains articles such as The Quantum Life by Paul Davies, and Darwin’s Legacy by Leonard Susskind (noted more below). We offer these technical quotes from Davies.

The 19th-century view of life as “magic matter”, exemplified by the use of the term “organic chemistry”, has been replaced by a model of the cell as a complex system of linked nanomachines operating under the control of digital software encoded in DNA. These Lilliputian components, made mostly from proteins, include pumps, rotors, ratchets, cables, levers, sensors and other mechanisms familiar to the physicist and engineer. (Davies)

The simplest known living organism is already stupendously complex, and it is inconceivable that such an entity would arise spontaneously by chance self-assembly. Most researchers suppose that life began either with a set of self-replicating, digital-information-carrying molecules much simpler than DNA, or with a self-catalyzing chemical cycle that stored no precise genetic information but was capable of producing additional quantities of the same chemical mixture. Both these approaches focus on the reproduction of material substances, which is only natural because, after all, known life reproduces by copying genetic material. However, the key properties of life — replication with variation, and natural selection — does not logically require material structures themselves to be replicated. It is sufficient that information is replicated. This opens up the possibility that life may have started with some form of quantum replicator: Q-life, if you like. (Davies)

Egel, Richard. Life’s Order, Complexity, Organization, and Its Thermodynamic-Holistic Imperatives. Life. Online November, 2012. (www.mdpi.com/journal/life.) The emeritus University of Copenhagen Biocenter geneticist achieves an insightful advocacy of the imminent (re)connection of biology with physics, of evolved organic entities with vital material substrates. An innovative context recalls the prescient insights of Jeffery Wicken, (1942-2002) as in his main work Evolution, Thermodynamics, and Information, (Oxford, 1987), who taught at Penn State for many years and is seen as laying out theoretical pathways to such a resolution. A 1995 companion paper by philosopher Iris Fry (search) is also availed to contrast these options – “continuity thesis or natural-law camp” vs. “happy accident or almost miracle.” From 2012, Egel’s affirms that the gulf between life and land has been bridged, - rather than improbable chance, living beings are now known to spontaneously arise and complexify by way of dynamical, self-organizing autocatalytic, integrative forces. The project goes on, which this site seeks to document, to better name, give credence to, and empower this cosmic Copernican revolution from mechanics to vitality, dark to light ages, from precarious nothing to an ordained teleological gestation.

This archetypical controversy of dualistic concepts reverberates in the bio-philosophical discourse under various guises, from ‘mind over matter’ and cell nuclei vs. proto- or cytoplasm to genotypes over phenotypes. It is tempting to merge Wicken’s insights and (Carl) Woesean wisdom about these matters as follows. The energetically charged prebiosphere had to consolidate a collectively functioning phenotype, before any individualistic genotypes could stand a reasonable chance of escaping, so as to make a living on their own. From there on, these individual organisms had to engage in relentless competition (as well as in symbiotically collaborative ecological relationships) with ever more diversifying other genotypes. (349) The origins of life are founded on three major roots, in this order of temporal, functional and logical priorities: a lasting energetic gradient on the pristine Earth between the radiating solar source and the sink of outer space; self-accreting networks of prebiotic macromolecules that happened to work together slowly; and an emerging archive to let the consolidating network remember how it actually had worked in the preceding period. (349)

Elgin, Duane. The Living Universe. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2009. Long engaged with both writings and walkings for a simpler, mindfully aware, ecological life style, much ahead of the curve, Duane Elgin kindly sent me a copy of his latest book. In a thank you, I mused that he has contributed to a revolution in the cosmic air from old moribund machine, alien to life and person, to a waxing, conducive, quickening “Mother Universe.” Along with both visionary expanses and caring communities in this volume, the author’s website www.awakeningearth.org offers a video introduction, some excerpts, and entries to his several other works.

Ellis, George F. R.. Physics and the Real World. Foundations of Physics. 36/2, 2006. A brief version appeared in Physics Today, July 2005. An exercise to better relate and square physical reality with the presence of risen life. But what kind of universe is Ellis trying to describe. Not the moribund megaverse of string theory whereof human beings are the most fleeting, insignificant anomaly. By such inherent animate properties cosmic matter is seen to develop into emergent modular hierarchies of sentient and creative entities, in so many words a natural genesis.

The challenge to physics is to develop a realistic description of causality in truly complex hierarchical structures, with top-down causation and memory effects allowing autonomous higher levels of order to emerge with genuine causal powers. (227)

Eschenmoser, Albert. The Search for the Chemistry of Life’s Origin. Tetrahedron. 63/12821, 2007. In this “International Journal for the Rapid Publication of Full Original Research Papers and Critical Reviews in Organic Chemistry,” the emeritus Swiss chemist offers as much a philosophical update upon a natural materiality that increasingly appears as fundamentally biological in kind, innately fertile with an evolutionary gestation, just now evident a personal humankind at the late verge of its own discovery.

Yet, contemporary chemistry, as a branch of natural science, cannot escape having become as much biology as biology has become molecular, a welcome development considering that the supreme expression of the chemical potential of matter is found in living organisms. (12821) An understanding of what it means for chemical matter to be alive at the level of lowest possible complexity is one of the goals to be attained; the philosophical impact on mankind’s thinking when chemists actually will be able to experimentally demonstrate the validity of the scientific postulate that life can emerge from non-life is another. (12821)

The central message to be taken from the wealth of experimental observations in prebiotic chemistry of the last half century is the insight that all major types of low-molecular weight building blocks of living organism, amino acids, sugard, and nucleobases,…are elementary organic molecules in the sense that their formation from (essentially) the elements and excess energy can proceed under an extraordinarily broad variety of conditions as a deterministic expression of matter’s organochemical potential. (12822)

Fondi, R. Evolutionism and Holism: Two Different Paradigms for the Phenomenon of Biological Evolution. International Journal of Ecodynamics. 1/3, 2007. A typical article to here present a new journal with this editorial purpose: to relate ecosystems to evolutionary thermodynamics in order to arrive at satisfactory solutions for sustainable development. The array of papers in the first two volumes, as its abstract conveys, evoke a dynamically alive natural genesis.

Besides, during the 20th century, the conceptual transformations produced by restricted and general relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, information theory, research into consciousness, chaos– complexity theory, evolutionary thermodynamics and biosemiotics have radically changed the scientific picture of reality. It is therefore necessary to adopt a more suitable and up-to-date paradigm, according to which nature is not seen anymore as a mere assembly of independent things, subject to the Lamarckian-Darwinian dialectics of ‘chance and necessity’, but as: (1) an extremely complex system with all its parts dynamically coordinated; (2) the evolution of which does not obey the logic of a deterministic linear continuity but that of an indeterministic global discontinuity; and (3) in which the mind or psychic dimension, particularly evident in semiotic aspects of the biological world, is an essential and indissoluble part. On the basis of its characteristics, the new paradigm can be generically named holistic, organicistic or systemic.

Fraser, Mariam, et al. Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism. Theory, Culture & Society. 22/1, 2005. An issue Introduction on a revived sense of nature’s fertile essence due to its phenomenal propensity for self-developing complexity. But as noted elsewhere, papers in this journal hold to a postmodernism that disavows a greater, knowable reality and tends to take commentaries on prior writings as real, rather than an actual vitality itself.

Freeland, Stephen and Gayle Philip. What Can the Origin of Life on Earth Tell Us About the Cosmos? Journal of Cosmology. Volume 10, 2010. NASA Astrobiology Institute, University of Hawaii, researchers muse that a steady, broad-based increase in evidence for a “life friendly” natural cosmos bodes well for a new, revised universe, indeed a “cosmogony,” which can include its inherent biological essence. See also the author’s article “Did Evolution Select a Nonrandom “Alphabet” of Amino Acids?” in Astrobiology (11/3, 2011) which argues that the latest findings imply these vital, optimum biochemicals could not have arise by chance.

Friston, Karl. Life as We Know It. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 6/10, 2013. The Wellcome Trust Centre theoretical neuroscientist expands his frontier studies, as many today, to rightly (re)join, root in, and explain living systems by way of a suitable physical substrate and ground which itself is under theoretical revision as much more spontaneously active. Through cast in technical arcana, see quotes and definitions below, the quest is to articulate a cosmic material nature as an integral source via its own innate qualities for evolving organisms and inquisitive people to inevitably appear, wonder, and discover.

This paper presents a heuristic proof (and simulations of a primordial soup) suggesting that life—or biological self-organization—is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket. This conclusion is based on the following arguments: if the coupling among an ensemble of dynamical systems is mediated by short-range forces, then the states of remote systems must be conditionally independent. These independencies induce a Markov blanket that separates internal and external states in a statistical sense. The existence of a Markov blanket means that internal states will appear to minimize a free energy functional of the states of their Markov blanket. Crucially, this is the same quantity that is optimized in Bayesian inference. In other words, they will appear to model—and act on—their world to preserve their functional and structural integrity, leading to homoeostasis and a simple form of autopoiesis. (Abstract)

“How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?” Erwin Schroedinger. (1944) The emergence of life—or biological self-organization—is an intriguing issue that has been addressed in many guises in the biological and physical sciences. This paper suggests that biological self-organization is not as remarkable as one might think—and is (almost) inevitable, given local interactions between the states of coupled dynamical systems. In brief, the events that ‘take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism’ (E.S.) may arise from the very existence of a boundary. (1)

In this section, we simulate a primordial soup to illustrate the emergence of biological self-organization. This soup comprises an ensemble of dynamical subsystems – each with its own structural and functional states – that are coupled through short-range interactions. These simulations are similar to simulations used to characterize pattern formation in dissipative systems; for example Turing instabilities; far from equilibrium systems; (e.g. Benard cells), percolation and reaction-diffusion systems. Self-assembly is another important example from chemistry that his biological connotations (e.g. for pre-biotic formation of proteins). (5)

Markov Blanket: In machine learning, the Markov blanket for a node in a Bayesian network is the set of nodes composed of 's parents, its children, and its children's other parents. In a Markov network, the Markov blanket of a node is its set of neighboring nodes. Ergodic: In mathematics, the term ergodic is used to describe a dynamical system which, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states (phase space). In physics the term is used to imply that a system satisfies the ergodic hypothesis of thermodynamics. (Wikipedia)

Gaeta, Francesco. Definition of Life. Rizzotti, Martino, ed. Defining Life. Padova, Italy: University of Padova Press, 1996. The new nonequilibrium thermodynamics can explain a cosmos made for emergent life.

A continuous thread seems to link together the events of the history of the Universe, from the Big Bang to the advent of Homo sapiens. The striking continuity of the general pattern of evolution suggests that the Universe was pregnant with life since beginning, and the biosphere was right from the start pregnant of mankind. (102)

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