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

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

Newman, Stuart and Marta Linde-Medina. Physical Determinants in the Emergence and Inheritance of Multicellular Form. Biological Theory. 8/3, 2013. The New York Medical College cell biologist, (search) and a University of Manchester life scientist, continue this general project, as it grows in numbers and veracity, to engage and characterize a physical materiality with its own dynamic spontaneity, along with a revised view of life’s evolution as influenced and guided by these formative forces, prior to selection. By this novel synthesis, as many concurrent postings aver, a grand (re)union of vitality and sentience, complexity and consciousness, with a conducive earthly ground and heavens is well underway. These are historic, revolutionary advances just reaching fruition. As the authors allude, these native nonlinear propensities, via “A New Physics of Condensed, Excitable Materials,” could be seen to take upon a genetic-like guise and agency. Life and persons are no longer accidental interlopers in an alien, pointless universe, but a significant cognizant phenomenon by which a self-creating genesis can discover itself.

We argue that the physics of complex materials and self-organizing processes should be made central to the biology of form. Rather than being encoded in genes, form emerges when cells and certain of their molecules mobilize physical forces, effects, and processes in a multicellular context. What is inherited from one generation to the next are not genetic programs for constructing organisms, but generative mechanisms of morphogenesis and pattern formation and the initial and boundary conditions for reproducing the specific traits of a taxon. There is no inherent antagonism between this “physicalist” perspective and genetics, since physics acts on matter, and gene products are essential material components of living systems whose variability affects the systems’ parameters. (Abstract)

Contemporary mesoscale physics utilizes concepts such as nonlinear oscillations, multistable dynamical systems, excitable media, reaction-diffusion, viscoelastic and other symmetry-breaking instabilities, chaos, and fractals, all of which were unknown to Newton or Darwin. All of these processes or effects are relevant to forms and patterns potentially assumed by developing tissues. It is in fact physically impossible for the morphology of living systems not to bear the imprint of these effects. (3) The modern sciences of mespscopic condensed excitable materials, however, show living matter (like other concensed, excitable systems) to be capable of self-organization by virtue of its intrinsic physical and chemical properties. But if inherent physical properties are the primary determinants of form, natural selection cannot play this central role. (Conclusion)

Newman, Stuart, et al. Before Programs: The Physical Origination of Multicellular Forms. International Journal of Development Biology. 50/2-3, 2006. In an issue on Developmental Morphodynamics, with co-authors Gabor Forgacs and Gerd Muller, theoretical insights into a substantial natural cosmos from which complex life will inexorably appear and arise. See also “Dynamical Patterning Modules” by Newman and Ramray Bhat in Physical Biology, 5/1, 2008, in a special issue on Physical Aspects of Developmental Biology.

Because the inherent physical properties, in their self-organizing capacities, but also conditioned by external parameters and extrinsic forces, can act as morphogenetic determinants, the dynamical, constraining and environmental aspects of develop The physical origination of multicellular forms mental causation can productively be analyzed in the framework of inherency and interaction, i.e., epigenesis. (290-291)

Nozick, Robert. Invariances. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. The late Harvard philosopher considers the increasing tendency in cosmological theories to accord the universe with organic and Darwinian features. But most of the work is taken up with clearing the ground that there is in fact an objective reality to philosophize about.

Within the evolutionary cosmology, the invariance of scientific laws under transformations might contribute to their heritability. (168)

O’Shea, Erin and Peter Wolynes, co-chairs. Research at the Intersection of the Physical and Life Sciences. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2010. A National Research Council manifesto for a synthesis of these disparate realms, mostly by way of applying nonlinear complex system theory. A stellar committee of 15 men and 8 women, e.g. Bonnie Bassler, Eugene Stanley, George Whitesides, Shirley Jackson, Astrid Prinz, and Thomas Cech, propose “common themes” such as Interaction and Information, Dynamics and Stochasticity, Self-Organization and Self-Assembly, to help bridge these domains, as they draw ever closer.

Another area finding fertile ground and producing fruitful cross-research opportunities centers on the dynamics of systems. Equilibrium, multistability, and stochastic behavior—concepts familiar to physicists and chemists—are now being used to tackle issues involved in living systems such as adaptation, feedback, and emergent behavior. Ideas of pattern formation that are at the heart of condensed matter physics now help us to understand biological self-assembly and the development of biological systems. (3)

Life itself is the ultimate paradigm of self-organization. What does it take to transition from inanimate to animated, living matter? The answer to this question involves issues of complexity in interacting systems, energy and information fluxes, memory, and other ingredients of self-organizing and self-replicating systems. (43)

Oberg, Karin, et al. Protoplanetary Disk Chemistry. arXiv:2309.05685. Harvard Smithsonian, University of Milan and Carnegie Institute for Science exochemists (see Oberg 2020) discuss the latest retrospective perceptions of how our orbital occasion, as it may gain a global sentience, came into material formation. See Bayesian Inference on the Isotopic Building Blocks of Mars and Earth. arXiv:2309.15290 for concurrent work. But we place this typical entry in our Ecosmos chapter lead section for its 2023 content quite attests to a phenomenal organic procreativity.

Planets form in disks of gas and dust around young stars. The disk molecular reservoirs and chemical evolution affect all aspects from the coagulation into pebbles to the material compositions of the mature planet. Here we review the protoplanetary disk chemistry of the volatile elements HOCNSP, and the links between disk and planet chemical compositions. Three takeaways are: (1) The disk chemical composition, including the organic reservoirs, is set by inheritance and in situ chemistry. (2) Disk gas and solid O/C/N/H ratios often deviate from stellar values. (3) Chemical, physical, and dynamical processes are often linked. (Excerpt)

Olma, Sebastian and Kostas Koukouselis. Life’s (Re-)Emergences. Theory, Culture & Society. 24/6, 2007. The Nottingham Trent University-based journal picks up on its theme of a New Vitalism, introduced earlier (22/1, search Fraser, Miriam). Dense postmodernism styles its writings, but if this perception is set within its ancient tradition so it is said, a continued effort to articulate a creative ‘immanence,’ missed by material reduction, could reveal an innately organic, viable cosmos.

Vitalism primarily constitutes a metaphysical doctrine advocating concepts of life that evade explanation in terms of mere mechanism. To the question of what distinguishes the living from the non-living, vitalism answers with the concept of vital force. Vital force remained the essence of vitalist philosophies, ancient and modern: Heraclitus’s logos and Aristotle’s entelechy gave way to Paracelsus’s archeus and William Blake’s energy. (3) New vitalism, as it is proposed by Fraser, et al, (2005), rejects such an essentialist or mythical vitalism by thinking process in terms of a molecular relationality that is prior to the molar objects and entities that might emerge from it.

Pino, Samanta, et al. On the Observable Transition to Living Matter. Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics. 9/1, 2011. Sapienza University of Roma (Pino, Ernesto Di Mauro), and University of Haifa (Edward Trifonov) researchers express inklings of nature’s intrinsic tendency to become alive, evolve, develop, and finally reconstruct how we latecomers came to be.

In recent developments in chemistry and genetic engineering, the humble researcher dealing with the origin of life finds her(him)self in a grey area of tackling something that even does not yet have a clear definition agreed upon. A series of chemical steps is described to be considered as the life–nonlife transition, if one adheres to the minimalistic definition: life is self-reproduction with variations. The fully artificial RNA system chosen for the exploration corresponds sequence-wise to the reconstructed initial triplet repeats, presumably corresponding to the earliest protein-coding molecules. The demonstrated occurrence of the mismatches (variations) in otherwise complementary syntheses (“self-reproduction”), in this RNA system, opens an experimental and conceptual perspective to explore the origin of life (and its definition), on the apparent edge of the origin. (Abstract)

There is plenty of room for a skeptic, who would deny the proposed self-reproducing and evolving system for the status of living entity. The power of evolution inherent in the system is, however, as immense as combinatorial potential of RNA sequences, and subsequent emergences one would expect from such evolving system may well turn to qualify as creation of life of an undeniable status. (13)

Pross, Addy. Seeking the Chemical Roots of Darwinism: Bridging between Chemistry and Biology. Chemistry: A European Journal. 15/8374, 2009. As this section documents, in recent years sentient life appears to be steadily rerooting itself into supposed “inorganic” depths. A Ben-Gurion University chemist continues his project (search) to discern a thermodynamic connection by proposing that if life’s prime, functional attribute is appreciated as an instructive genome, then a “second law” of evolutionary emergence can accrue, and provide a missing connection. By so doing, a dichotomy in origin studies between metabolism or RNA first is resolved in favor of a genetic sequence. Pross spoke at the Origins 2011 meeting noted in Breaking News, a video is online. See also his: “Toward a General Theory of Evolution: Extending Darwinian Theory to Inanimate Matter” in Journal of Systems Chemistry (2/1, 2011)

Chemistry and biology are intimately connected sciences yet the chemistry–biology interface remains problematic and central issues regarding the very essence of living systems remain unresolved. In this essay we build on a kinetic theory of replicating systems that encompasses the idea that there are two distinct kinds of stability in nature—thermodynamic stability, associated with “regular” chemical systems, and dynamic kinetic stability, associated with replicating systems. That fundamental distinction is utilized to bridge between chemistry and biology by demonstrating that within the parallel world of replicating systems there is a second law analogue to the second law of thermodynamics, and that Darwinian theory may, through scientific reductionism, be related to that second law analogue. (Abstract, 8374)

Pross, Addy. What is Life?: How Chemistry becomes Biology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Akin to the work of Lee Cronin, Brian Larson, et al, and many others, the Australian-Israeli Ben Gurion University of the Negev biochemist contributes a book-length treatment for this necessary (re)union of a fertile substantial abiogenesis and subsequent evolutionary emergence. By way of novel perceptions of “reactive chemical matter” as informed by self-organizing networks, an innate drive dubbed “dynamic kinetic stability,” as the quotes describe, is advanced to provide the missing explanation. These theories are seen to at last fulfill the 1940s prescience of Erwin Schrodinger whose book by the same title argued for an imperative physical basis for living entities.

The purpose of this book is to reassess this enthralling subject and demonstrate a general law that underlies the emergence, existence, and nature of all living things can bow be outlines. I will argue that thanks to a newly defined area of chemistry “Systems Chemistry,” the existing chasm separating chemistry and biology can now be bridged, and the central biological paradigm, Darwinism, is just the biological manifestation of a broader physiochemical description of natural forces. (xiii) Indeed, that is the essence of Aristotle’s teleological view – that there is an underlying purpose to the workings of nature, that purpose governs the cosmos as a whole. Given the bountiful biological evidence for Aristotle’s teleological argument, in retrospect it is quite understandable that teleological thinking held up largely uncontested for over two millennia. (33)

In the context of chemical systems, static and dynamics forms of stability very different. In the ‘regular’ chemical world a system is stable if it does not react. In the world of replicating systems, however, a system is stable if it does react – to make more of itself, and those replicating entities that are more reactive, in that they are better at making more of themselves, are more stable (in the sense of being persistent) than those that aren’t. This is almost a paradox – greater stability is associated with greater reactivity. We therefore call the kind of stability associated with replicating systems a dynamic kinetic stability. (71)

Rees, Martin. Ree's Law. www.edge.org/q2004/q04_print.html. The Cambridge University astronomer posted these insights in response to the question "What's Your Law?" on the John Brockman's Edge Foundation website in January 2004. The first sentence of the quote is 'Rees Law.'

As cosmological theories advance, they will draw more concepts from biology. The part of the universe astronomers can observe is probably only a tiny part of the aftermath of 'our' big bang, which in turn may be one of an infinity of 'bangs' in which the physics may be very different from in ours. To analyse how our own cosmic habitat relates to this ensemble, we'll need to draw on concepts from ecology and evolutionary biology ('fitness landscapes', etc). So we'll need biological ideas to understand the beginning. But biology may control the far future too. In some 'universes' (ours perhaps among them) life can eventually become pervasive and powerful enough to renders the dynamics of the cosmic future as unpredictable as that of an organism or mind.

Ricard, Jacques. Systems Biology and the Origins of Life? Part II: Networks of Catalysed Chemical Reactions: Non-equilibrium, Self-organization and Evolution. Comptes Rendus Biologies. 33/11, 2010. The emeritus director of the Institut Jaques Monod, Paris, provides adjacent papers in this issue, Part I more on biochemical networks. These follow from his books: the 2006 Emergent Collective Properties, Networks and Information in Biology, and 1999 Biological Complexity and the Dynamics of Life Process, Volumes 34 and 40 in the New Comprehensive Biochemistry Series from Elsevier Amsterdam. While highly technical, we note because since cellular life is seen as the epitome of dynamical complexity, it can thus be described by statistical mechanics. But the subject remains mostly approached via “reductive, mechanistic, and physical” terms. Could just a shift of metaphor or paradigm allow imaginations of an innately organic reality? This is the natural philosophy project that awaits its revival today.

Rosen, Steven. The Self-Evolving Cosmos. Singapore: World Scientific, 2008. The emeritus CCNY psychologist expands on the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger to add a missing subjective phase to objective physics. By this approach, albeit by a dense argument and style, a cosmic “individuation” can be discerned. A synopsis article “Quantum Gravity and Phenomenological Philosophy” can be found in Foundations of Physics, (38/6, 2008).

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