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The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere
Uniting the conceptual foundations of the physical sciences and biology, this groundbreaking multidisciplinary book explores the origin of life as a planetary process. Combining geology, geochemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, evolution and statistical physics to create an inclusive picture of the living state, the authors develop the argument that the emergence of life was a necessary cascade of non-equilibrium phase transitions that opened new channels for chemical energy flow on Earth. This full colour and logically structured book introduces the main areas of significance and provides a well-ordered and accessible introduction to multiple literatures outside the confines of disciplinary specializations, as well as including an extensive bibliography to provide context and further reading. For researchers, professionals entering the field or specialists looking for a coherent overview, this text brings together diverse perspectives to form a unified picture of the origin of life and the ongoing organization of the biosphere.
691 pages, Hardcover
First published April 30, 2016
33 people are currently reading
379 people want to read
About the author
Eric Smith
367 books16 followersEric Smith was born the fifth of six children. He served a full-time English-speaking mission from 2000-2002 in what was then the Illinois Chicago North Mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He studied English and earth science education in Rexburg, Idaho, at BYU-Idaho, particularly enjoying and excelling in geology, editing, and English and early-American literature. He earned his teaching certificate and a bachelor of science degree in 2007. He enjoys writing imaginative, critical, and biographical pieces. Some of his favorite books include "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray." In addition to writing and speaking, Eric enjoys tech, superhero lore, folf, firearms, and film, particularly those made by Christopher Nolan and those starring Jimmy Stewart.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 4, 2020
There simply is no better discussion of First Life than any discussion given by Eric Smith, be it through his many academic papers, lectures, or this textbook. Smith is concerned with understanding life as a continuation of a process that emerged on Earth. Meaning, he is not merely looking for the first cell that could replicate, though he is looking into that, he is looking at the process by which the Earth itself provided the energy to make the materials of life. That process, and not merely the living cell made from that process, is what defines life. I am firmly of the belief that is the only way we can talk about the generation of first life.
No matter how we talk about the emergence of life, whether some people subscribe to the RNA world (which is not the same idea as "RNA first"), whether some people want to talk about random activation of enzymes that cross a Erdos Renyi node-edge threshold and create an autocatalytic set, or any other hypothesis, that hypothesis has to account for available free energy. In order to recognize such a source of energy, researchers need to be very aware of how the molecules of life go about ingesting and cycling energy to maintain activity and to replicate. Once we recognize the process, we can better understand how life is constructed and how it survives over generations. Smith is incredibly skilled at detailing this process.
I have to say, Lewis Dartnell's 2007 book Life in the Universe is equally good at detailing this process and pointing out what to look for and was shockingly forward thinking for 2007.
One key point Smith makes is that in order to understand any form of life, you need to understand the citric acid cycle. Forget memorizing it the way you did in school. Know it as an active process because it is the key to understanding what life is and how it came to be.
Smith and Morowitz have put together an extremely important book that is a must read for anyone interested in understanding or studying the origins of life.
No matter how we talk about the emergence of life, whether some people subscribe to the RNA world (which is not the same idea as "RNA first"), whether some people want to talk about random activation of enzymes that cross a Erdos Renyi node-edge threshold and create an autocatalytic set, or any other hypothesis, that hypothesis has to account for available free energy. In order to recognize such a source of energy, researchers need to be very aware of how the molecules of life go about ingesting and cycling energy to maintain activity and to replicate. Once we recognize the process, we can better understand how life is constructed and how it survives over generations. Smith is incredibly skilled at detailing this process.
I have to say, Lewis Dartnell's 2007 book Life in the Universe is equally good at detailing this process and pointing out what to look for and was shockingly forward thinking for 2007.
One key point Smith makes is that in order to understand any form of life, you need to understand the citric acid cycle. Forget memorizing it the way you did in school. Know it as an active process because it is the key to understanding what life is and how it came to be.
Smith and Morowitz have put together an extremely important book that is a must read for anyone interested in understanding or studying the origins of life.
November 18, 2016
In this stunning, magisterial, and surprisingly wide-ranging book, Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz approach the origin of life from first principles and bring together knowledge from astrophysics, geochemistry, biochemistry, information theory and statistical mechanics to show how all the hints and constraints we know so far about life’s start and the universal patterns of life we’ve found compel us to adopt a new framework to understand life: life is a complex series of non-equilibrium phase transitions driven by a persistent geochemical redox potential.
First, Smith and Morowitz argue that the ecosystem is the correct level to view the phenomenon of life and how it integrates with the rest of the planet’s geochemistry. It is only there that one can see the closed, robust nature of life. In every ecosystem from hydrothermal vents to rainforests, the ecosystem as a whole takes in inorganic inputs and free energy and builds biomass using a conserved core set of metabolic reactions. These core reactions give us many hints to the context of where and how life began suggesting the primary role of hydrothermal vents and of autocatalytic chemical networks.
Next, Smith and Morowitz examine the physical conditions that were present before life began and ask the question: what stress was present in the non-living world that could have compelled the phenomenon of life into existence? Any non-equilibrium process (of which life is the most complex example) requires energy and a barrier to keep that energy from dissipating away too quickly. Smith and Morowitz take the physicist’s view and list many possible energy sources present on or around the early Earth and the barriers that could have maintained them. For example, they point out that the sun uses gravitational potential energy to drive nuclear fusion and the barrier to dissipation is the low probability of having a fusion collision which is set by the weak force!
They then review the geophysical and geochemical processes that take place in the mantle, the crust and the atmosphere and describe the redox states of minerals in the mantle and how the atmosphere on the surface is held at a more oxidized state by hydrogen escape. (This chapter is the most in-depth and best introduction to the field of geochemistry that I’ve ever read.) The reduced state of the mantle and the oxidized state of the atmosphere turns the Earth into a giant redox battery (which has precisely the right energy difference to run the organic reactions of life) with the barrier being the crust itself and hydrothermal vents acting to concentrate this diffuse redox energy to specific points on Earth.
Smith and Morowitz then present the core metabolic reactions that are universal to all life. This set of reactions creates a closed feedback loop and the whole loop (and most of the steps) are energetically favorable in a reduced hydrothermal vent environment. The core processes of life want to happen spontaneously at vents! Patterns and structure in core metabolism also reveal many more hints as to the key steps life needed to pass through on its journey to “lift itself off the rocks”. The evidence is fascinating and compelling, but there’s too much to adequately summarize here.
Throughout the book, Smith and Morowitz argue that the most important question is not how were the organic precursors to life synthesized, but instead how was the selectivity of chemical reactions robustly maintained? There are many proposed reaction pathways to produce the building blocks of life, but the problem is that these pathways make many more products than the ones life uses and these unwanted products would starve the early reactions of life from getting enough input material. Bringing the questions of selectivity and robustness to center stage immediately suggests that one could use the tools of information theory and phase transitions to make progress.
Information theory studies the storage and communication of information and deals with things like error-correcting codes that help you preserve information if you’re sending it through a noisy channel. Studying phases of matter has yielded a mathematical framework to understand how qualitatively different macroscale behavior (like ice or water) can result from the same fundamental building blocks and interactions (H2O molecules and electromagnetic interactions). Error correction in message transmission and the maintenance of some system in a particular phase require that only certain configurations of message or system can be selected. Furthermore, we know that the stability of a phase and the efficacy of message transmission mean that such selectivity can be robust.
The authors then give an introduction to the broad and successful field of phase transitions and describe how ideas from information theory fit into understanding what a phase really is. This introduction leads to the math necessary to understand dynamic phase transitions in out of equilibrium chemical networks (which is close to what we’d want to understand life!) and includes a fantastic introduction to the modern viewpoint of how the universe formed as a cascade of phase transitions starting with the quark-gluon plasma right after the Big Bang to nucleons to neutral atoms to chemistry to eventually, after every symmetry has been frozen, superconductivity.
Finally, Smith and Morowitz bring all these ideas together and describe how they conceptualize “the nature of the living state”. Central are the ideas of robustness and modularity. They recount a parable about two watchmakers who are trying to build complex watches and are both interrupted every few minutes. One builds the watch in a very complex way so that it only works if all the pieces are in place and falls apart if the watchmaker leaves halfway through. The other watchmaker builds his watch out of self-contained modules which are each stable on their own. His progress remains when he is interrupted. The second watchmaker is able to finish his watch much faster than the first. We can see that modularity gives us a way of preserving a complex system against perturbations and of building more complex structures without the whole system becoming unmanageable or unstable. The modularity of life is evident everywhere one looks and is returned to again and again throughout the book.
Modularity links with another idea that Smith and Morowitz emphasize: why can physics theories work at all if we don’t know the underlying building blocks of the world? The answer actually comes from the study of phases and is closely related to modularity. Matter in a certain phase can be described by an “effective theory” within that phase that allows us to ignore laws of the universe that act outside the regime of that phase. For example, the laws of chemistry don’t really apply when the world is too hot and atoms are ionized into plasma. The cascade of freezing transitions that matter undergoes itself represents a type of modularity and robustness. One phase lets us have molecules, we can then use molecules as the building blocks for minerals, which can then be used as the building blocks for more complex structures. Although much work remains, Smith and Morowitz see similar ideas present in how life self-organized into such a hierarchical and modular form (although in life’s case, it remained fully out-of-equilibrium unlike the phase transitions for matter mentioned above).
Overall, this was one of the most profound and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. It provides a solid foundation for those who are sufficiently motivated to reach the forefront of the current discussions on the origin of life. It also provides tools and ideas that have shaped how I understand the world more generally. I learned so much from this book! As a warning, the book assumes comfort with several branches of science (geology, chemistry and physics) and is rather dense at parts, but the book is laid out in a modular enough way that one should be able to find those parts of the book they are most interested in. It’s not light reading, but the insights in this book are totally worth the effort for those interested in the origin of life!
First, Smith and Morowitz argue that the ecosystem is the correct level to view the phenomenon of life and how it integrates with the rest of the planet’s geochemistry. It is only there that one can see the closed, robust nature of life. In every ecosystem from hydrothermal vents to rainforests, the ecosystem as a whole takes in inorganic inputs and free energy and builds biomass using a conserved core set of metabolic reactions. These core reactions give us many hints to the context of where and how life began suggesting the primary role of hydrothermal vents and of autocatalytic chemical networks.
Next, Smith and Morowitz examine the physical conditions that were present before life began and ask the question: what stress was present in the non-living world that could have compelled the phenomenon of life into existence? Any non-equilibrium process (of which life is the most complex example) requires energy and a barrier to keep that energy from dissipating away too quickly. Smith and Morowitz take the physicist’s view and list many possible energy sources present on or around the early Earth and the barriers that could have maintained them. For example, they point out that the sun uses gravitational potential energy to drive nuclear fusion and the barrier to dissipation is the low probability of having a fusion collision which is set by the weak force!
They then review the geophysical and geochemical processes that take place in the mantle, the crust and the atmosphere and describe the redox states of minerals in the mantle and how the atmosphere on the surface is held at a more oxidized state by hydrogen escape. (This chapter is the most in-depth and best introduction to the field of geochemistry that I’ve ever read.) The reduced state of the mantle and the oxidized state of the atmosphere turns the Earth into a giant redox battery (which has precisely the right energy difference to run the organic reactions of life) with the barrier being the crust itself and hydrothermal vents acting to concentrate this diffuse redox energy to specific points on Earth.
Smith and Morowitz then present the core metabolic reactions that are universal to all life. This set of reactions creates a closed feedback loop and the whole loop (and most of the steps) are energetically favorable in a reduced hydrothermal vent environment. The core processes of life want to happen spontaneously at vents! Patterns and structure in core metabolism also reveal many more hints as to the key steps life needed to pass through on its journey to “lift itself off the rocks”. The evidence is fascinating and compelling, but there’s too much to adequately summarize here.
Throughout the book, Smith and Morowitz argue that the most important question is not how were the organic precursors to life synthesized, but instead how was the selectivity of chemical reactions robustly maintained? There are many proposed reaction pathways to produce the building blocks of life, but the problem is that these pathways make many more products than the ones life uses and these unwanted products would starve the early reactions of life from getting enough input material. Bringing the questions of selectivity and robustness to center stage immediately suggests that one could use the tools of information theory and phase transitions to make progress.
Information theory studies the storage and communication of information and deals with things like error-correcting codes that help you preserve information if you’re sending it through a noisy channel. Studying phases of matter has yielded a mathematical framework to understand how qualitatively different macroscale behavior (like ice or water) can result from the same fundamental building blocks and interactions (H2O molecules and electromagnetic interactions). Error correction in message transmission and the maintenance of some system in a particular phase require that only certain configurations of message or system can be selected. Furthermore, we know that the stability of a phase and the efficacy of message transmission mean that such selectivity can be robust.
The authors then give an introduction to the broad and successful field of phase transitions and describe how ideas from information theory fit into understanding what a phase really is. This introduction leads to the math necessary to understand dynamic phase transitions in out of equilibrium chemical networks (which is close to what we’d want to understand life!) and includes a fantastic introduction to the modern viewpoint of how the universe formed as a cascade of phase transitions starting with the quark-gluon plasma right after the Big Bang to nucleons to neutral atoms to chemistry to eventually, after every symmetry has been frozen, superconductivity.
Finally, Smith and Morowitz bring all these ideas together and describe how they conceptualize “the nature of the living state”. Central are the ideas of robustness and modularity. They recount a parable about two watchmakers who are trying to build complex watches and are both interrupted every few minutes. One builds the watch in a very complex way so that it only works if all the pieces are in place and falls apart if the watchmaker leaves halfway through. The other watchmaker builds his watch out of self-contained modules which are each stable on their own. His progress remains when he is interrupted. The second watchmaker is able to finish his watch much faster than the first. We can see that modularity gives us a way of preserving a complex system against perturbations and of building more complex structures without the whole system becoming unmanageable or unstable. The modularity of life is evident everywhere one looks and is returned to again and again throughout the book.
Modularity links with another idea that Smith and Morowitz emphasize: why can physics theories work at all if we don’t know the underlying building blocks of the world? The answer actually comes from the study of phases and is closely related to modularity. Matter in a certain phase can be described by an “effective theory” within that phase that allows us to ignore laws of the universe that act outside the regime of that phase. For example, the laws of chemistry don’t really apply when the world is too hot and atoms are ionized into plasma. The cascade of freezing transitions that matter undergoes itself represents a type of modularity and robustness. One phase lets us have molecules, we can then use molecules as the building blocks for minerals, which can then be used as the building blocks for more complex structures. Although much work remains, Smith and Morowitz see similar ideas present in how life self-organized into such a hierarchical and modular form (although in life’s case, it remained fully out-of-equilibrium unlike the phase transitions for matter mentioned above).
Overall, this was one of the most profound and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read. It provides a solid foundation for those who are sufficiently motivated to reach the forefront of the current discussions on the origin of life. It also provides tools and ideas that have shaped how I understand the world more generally. I learned so much from this book! As a warning, the book assumes comfort with several branches of science (geology, chemistry and physics) and is rather dense at parts, but the book is laid out in a modular enough way that one should be able to find those parts of the book they are most interested in. It’s not light reading, but the insights in this book are totally worth the effort for those interested in the origin of life!
March 22, 2019
Well, I'm left with no other choice than to say I was amazed by "The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere". There is no doubt that this book is great: grand yet humble, subtly nuanced yet clear, and deftly abstract yet utterly grounded in the facts. Despite this, I nearly found portions of it impenetrable. I'll admit I did only skim some of these more technical sections. I should also admit it I read it somewhat irregularly over the span of about a year.
There are long sections and even chapters of clear, careful passages saying (to my crass ears) very nearly the same thing with just slightly different shades of nuance, followed sharply by very deep dives into particular physical phenomena with only the slightest perceivable threads of connective tissue (as someone with a popular understanding fields under discussion).
However, this book eventually reveals the suggestion that these sharp turns from deft writing into cascades of bio-geo-chemical detail are a result of their ontological commitments in their scientific approach. It seems as though the literal content of their approach is the interplay of theoretical model and data, as though the terms expressed in scientific work must literally be the terms of Bayesian interpretation. As a result, what this book will never give you is a narrative history of the origins of life, because a narrative will never be given by inferred physical facts about the deep past nor by the theoretical principles which explain its dynamics.
I have no doubt that if I had not first read "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" by Nick Lane (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which provides such a narrative, I would have been utterly clueless about how the variety of mechanisms proposed worked together to form a theory of life's origins. Instead of describing a potential narrative, this book describes the space of all possible narratives in line with their theory. To be able to think about the potential development of complex physical phenomena at this level of abstraction shows profound expertise and intellectual refinement. It is my recommendation for the lay reader to first read "The Vital Question" so as to have an understanding of the broader space being articulated. If there are any serious contradictions between the theories of these two books, they either escaped my attention or completely elided my abilities entirely.
Having said that, the book uses its most careful and clear passages to leave absolutely no doubt about what their the claims say about how we should understand nature. They propose that life's emergence from Earth's geology was in no way an left to chance in the sense that the right chemicals happened to mix together on under the right energy conditions on some fine day. In that scenario, here would be nothing to hold that mixture, and moreover the hierarchy of mixtures required to get to the complexity of life, continuing to interact together in an integrated way. Instead, the interaction of persistent channels of geological energy though early Earth's particular geochemistry created consistent conditions where those underlying chemicals were subject to a sustained non-equilibrium phase transition as sustained shared forces causes metabolic states to persist. Living on the edge of persisting geological heat transfer such as through ocean vents, the metabolic pathways formed around a lunch that was not only free, but that they were thermodynamicly paid to eat.
In this account of events, these metabolic pathways of construction and consumption preceded genetic encoding, and even selection and individuality, and yet persist to this day. This is taken to be biological life as it was and is. In this interpretation, each ecosystem containing a complete functioning and energy sufficient chart of metabolic pathways is viewed as a individual biological unit. Taken together, the biosphere plays a distinct geochemical role as a channel of dispersion for geological energy, and thus is a distinct geosphere.
To establish its ideas, the book takes a very unusual structure. There are eight chapters. Chapters one, two, and eight have more of the quality of a summary or position statement, establishing or summing up the claims at hand. These are all easily readable. Chapters three, four, and five establish the physical picture, starting from the geophysical and geochemical in chapter three, into the biochemical in chapter four, and solidly microbiological in chapter five. Chapter six lays out a fragmentary picture of the emergence of the biosphere from geochemistry, based on this foundation. Chapter seven then doubles back, and gives an account of phase transitions and other non-equilibrium thermodynamic ideas, as well as allied ideas from information theory.
Why is chapter seven all the way back there, given that it has the theoretical machinery necessary for framing the whole thing? The answer seems to be that it doesn't actually have any such machinery, but is instead a perspective. It is more like someone reading up to that point asks "ok, that's great, but why did you do it that way?" and this phase transition paradigm points to a set of attitudes and intuitions that are secondary to the main argument. There's one point where this book deliberately leaves out something that would have the work much stronger, which is to give an account of how the structure of life today manifests all of the modularity, error-correction, buffering, and so forth that they think is critical to understanding life's original development. It might have gone a long way to even out the technical and non-technical sections.
Having said that, all of the twists and turns produce some really interesting points and lovely cross-disciplinary excursions, such as:
* Just because a system is far from equilibrium and not well-bound by the thermodynamics of equilibrium, this does not mean that thermodynamics does not apply, and in particular that defining entropy in the right "frame of reference" for the phase transition processes at hand should provide a more appropriate bound, and indeed summary statistics, on the behavior of that system. Thus, we've been mistaken in treating the far-from-equilibrium conditions of life as the end of the story, rather than the beginning.
* Topology (as in the mathematical subject) plays a role in creating singular points for the heat exchange from the Earth's core to its surface, as the cylindrical surface of rotating fields do not back cleanly inside of the sphere of the Earth, or something like that.
* For a moment while reading a section on the freezing hierarchy of matter, I briefly had an understanding of how lowering the temperature of matter "freezes out" different symmetries, leading to the whole variety of states we can observe and theorize about. It was really remarkable to see the emergence of a discernible weak force and superconductivity to be phrased in the same framework as liquids and solids.
* Evolution might evolve neutrally towards greater and lesser modularity, where modular changes then pay off with greater adaptivity or selective discrimination later.
While it was quite fascinating seeing all of these disciplines bumping up against each other in a single volume, it was difficult for me to tell whether the physics of non-equilibrium thermodynamics is actually the right framework or whether it really is guided by a sympathetic set of metaphors for their proposal. I suppose that will be a matter of how this work yet develops. It's hard to tell the difference between a scientific paradigm and an intellectual approach; probably impossible when you're in the middle of it.
This was not a concern that the authors were unaware of. They tell a parable about refrigerators. The theory of an idealized refrigerator falls very simply out of equilibrium thermodynamics. However, how refrigerators physically came to exist from in the world is highly historically contingent and involves many layers of non-equilibrium complexity resting upon that of life's emergence. This provokes a line of thought the book does not follow: if life is the fourth geo-sphere, are their more? Is there a kind of techno-sphere, and does it emerge with the same kind of necessity, as life leaves "energy on the table" in terms of fuels, which later life will likely then exploit? Or, is this more contingent, more of chance than necessity, like a storm formed in the chaos of a small difference?
Overall, if you enjoy reading significant popular works of biology, reading this book constitutes an invigorating project due to its scale, complexity, and profundity. Yet, despite this, there will be plenty here for you.
Prior to reading this sort of book, I will read reviews and commentaries, and these days often watch talks by the authors about the book. I recall watching a talk Eric Smith gave about the book (Harold Morowitz having passed away). In the questions from the audience, he's asked about recognizing the importance of non-physical spiritual energy in understanding life, and he replied with a remark about the challenge of listening among people with different frames of reference. That was fascinating; it was as though he thought through every path that conversation could take and took the one that was humble, fair, and on a level treating the questioner as a peer. Sometimes, I wondered who exactly this book was for given the wide varieties of levels it traversed, but yet there was still so much written with this generosity.
There are long sections and even chapters of clear, careful passages saying (to my crass ears) very nearly the same thing with just slightly different shades of nuance, followed sharply by very deep dives into particular physical phenomena with only the slightest perceivable threads of connective tissue (as someone with a popular understanding fields under discussion).
However, this book eventually reveals the suggestion that these sharp turns from deft writing into cascades of bio-geo-chemical detail are a result of their ontological commitments in their scientific approach. It seems as though the literal content of their approach is the interplay of theoretical model and data, as though the terms expressed in scientific work must literally be the terms of Bayesian interpretation. As a result, what this book will never give you is a narrative history of the origins of life, because a narrative will never be given by inferred physical facts about the deep past nor by the theoretical principles which explain its dynamics.
I have no doubt that if I had not first read "The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life" by Nick Lane (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), which provides such a narrative, I would have been utterly clueless about how the variety of mechanisms proposed worked together to form a theory of life's origins. Instead of describing a potential narrative, this book describes the space of all possible narratives in line with their theory. To be able to think about the potential development of complex physical phenomena at this level of abstraction shows profound expertise and intellectual refinement. It is my recommendation for the lay reader to first read "The Vital Question" so as to have an understanding of the broader space being articulated. If there are any serious contradictions between the theories of these two books, they either escaped my attention or completely elided my abilities entirely.
Having said that, the book uses its most careful and clear passages to leave absolutely no doubt about what their the claims say about how we should understand nature. They propose that life's emergence from Earth's geology was in no way an left to chance in the sense that the right chemicals happened to mix together on under the right energy conditions on some fine day. In that scenario, here would be nothing to hold that mixture, and moreover the hierarchy of mixtures required to get to the complexity of life, continuing to interact together in an integrated way. Instead, the interaction of persistent channels of geological energy though early Earth's particular geochemistry created consistent conditions where those underlying chemicals were subject to a sustained non-equilibrium phase transition as sustained shared forces causes metabolic states to persist. Living on the edge of persisting geological heat transfer such as through ocean vents, the metabolic pathways formed around a lunch that was not only free, but that they were thermodynamicly paid to eat.
In this account of events, these metabolic pathways of construction and consumption preceded genetic encoding, and even selection and individuality, and yet persist to this day. This is taken to be biological life as it was and is. In this interpretation, each ecosystem containing a complete functioning and energy sufficient chart of metabolic pathways is viewed as a individual biological unit. Taken together, the biosphere plays a distinct geochemical role as a channel of dispersion for geological energy, and thus is a distinct geosphere.
To establish its ideas, the book takes a very unusual structure. There are eight chapters. Chapters one, two, and eight have more of the quality of a summary or position statement, establishing or summing up the claims at hand. These are all easily readable. Chapters three, four, and five establish the physical picture, starting from the geophysical and geochemical in chapter three, into the biochemical in chapter four, and solidly microbiological in chapter five. Chapter six lays out a fragmentary picture of the emergence of the biosphere from geochemistry, based on this foundation. Chapter seven then doubles back, and gives an account of phase transitions and other non-equilibrium thermodynamic ideas, as well as allied ideas from information theory.
Why is chapter seven all the way back there, given that it has the theoretical machinery necessary for framing the whole thing? The answer seems to be that it doesn't actually have any such machinery, but is instead a perspective. It is more like someone reading up to that point asks "ok, that's great, but why did you do it that way?" and this phase transition paradigm points to a set of attitudes and intuitions that are secondary to the main argument. There's one point where this book deliberately leaves out something that would have the work much stronger, which is to give an account of how the structure of life today manifests all of the modularity, error-correction, buffering, and so forth that they think is critical to understanding life's original development. It might have gone a long way to even out the technical and non-technical sections.
Having said that, all of the twists and turns produce some really interesting points and lovely cross-disciplinary excursions, such as:
* Just because a system is far from equilibrium and not well-bound by the thermodynamics of equilibrium, this does not mean that thermodynamics does not apply, and in particular that defining entropy in the right "frame of reference" for the phase transition processes at hand should provide a more appropriate bound, and indeed summary statistics, on the behavior of that system. Thus, we've been mistaken in treating the far-from-equilibrium conditions of life as the end of the story, rather than the beginning.
* Topology (as in the mathematical subject) plays a role in creating singular points for the heat exchange from the Earth's core to its surface, as the cylindrical surface of rotating fields do not back cleanly inside of the sphere of the Earth, or something like that.
* For a moment while reading a section on the freezing hierarchy of matter, I briefly had an understanding of how lowering the temperature of matter "freezes out" different symmetries, leading to the whole variety of states we can observe and theorize about. It was really remarkable to see the emergence of a discernible weak force and superconductivity to be phrased in the same framework as liquids and solids.
* Evolution might evolve neutrally towards greater and lesser modularity, where modular changes then pay off with greater adaptivity or selective discrimination later.
While it was quite fascinating seeing all of these disciplines bumping up against each other in a single volume, it was difficult for me to tell whether the physics of non-equilibrium thermodynamics is actually the right framework or whether it really is guided by a sympathetic set of metaphors for their proposal. I suppose that will be a matter of how this work yet develops. It's hard to tell the difference between a scientific paradigm and an intellectual approach; probably impossible when you're in the middle of it.
This was not a concern that the authors were unaware of. They tell a parable about refrigerators. The theory of an idealized refrigerator falls very simply out of equilibrium thermodynamics. However, how refrigerators physically came to exist from in the world is highly historically contingent and involves many layers of non-equilibrium complexity resting upon that of life's emergence. This provokes a line of thought the book does not follow: if life is the fourth geo-sphere, are their more? Is there a kind of techno-sphere, and does it emerge with the same kind of necessity, as life leaves "energy on the table" in terms of fuels, which later life will likely then exploit? Or, is this more contingent, more of chance than necessity, like a storm formed in the chaos of a small difference?
Overall, if you enjoy reading significant popular works of biology, reading this book constitutes an invigorating project due to its scale, complexity, and profundity. Yet, despite this, there will be plenty here for you.
Prior to reading this sort of book, I will read reviews and commentaries, and these days often watch talks by the authors about the book. I recall watching a talk Eric Smith gave about the book (Harold Morowitz having passed away). In the questions from the audience, he's asked about recognizing the importance of non-physical spiritual energy in understanding life, and he replied with a remark about the challenge of listening among people with different frames of reference. That was fascinating; it was as though he thought through every path that conversation could take and took the one that was humble, fair, and on a level treating the questioner as a peer. Sometimes, I wondered who exactly this book was for given the wide varieties of levels it traversed, but yet there was still so much written with this generosity.
September 29, 2021
I have been following the material coming out of the Santa Fe Institute for decades, but somehow I missed this 2016 publication when it first came out, and only discovered it in 2019. But what a discovery! The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere is an intellectual feast. It is full of challenging ideas, novel perspectives and grand unifying principles. It is a physicist’s approach to life’s origin, and it is glorious.
For the remainder of this review, I’ll refer to the book as TFG, standing for The Fourth Geosphere.
Like everything coming out of the Santa Fe Institute, TFG is quite multidisciplinary. While I have some background in organic chemistry, evolutionary biology and physics, my fluency in those fields was inadequate to make the book an easy read. Quite the contrary: I read it through twice over a period of a year, emailed the primary author for clarifications and wrote out a long form summary. Finally, on the principle that the best way to understand anything is to try to explain it, I composed my own, popular-science level version of the text. (That book is published as Spontaneous Order and the Origin of Life.)
The theory of the origin of life expounded in TFG falls in the general category of Metabolism-First theories, an approach proposing that evolution in chemical networks preceded RNA replication. Its central claim is that the energy processing mechanism found in all living things, metabolism, is continuous with the flows of energy and chemistry in the early geochemical environment. From this perspective, RNA and its precursors arose only later, after geochemistry had attained a certain level of spontaneous organization.
This is the viewpoint underlying Jeremy England’s Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things, and Nick Lane’s The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, both excellent books that are well worth reading. Unlike these and other versions of Metabolism-First, however, TFG is a comprehensive presentation that grounds itself in universal principles and carries its idea forward through all phases of biosphere development. It has several moving parts, all intertwined, and each one fascinating. I will try to introduce each of them here.
TFG begins by asking the reader to shift level of abstraction. Rather than focus on individual organisms and lineages, as is common in evolutionary biology, it elevates its perspective as high as an orbiting space station, and evaluates the biosphere as a planetary process. From this perspective, the particular organisms that compose the biosphere at any period in history, whether they are archaea, trilobites or wildebeest, matters little. Regardless of particular components, the biosphere as a whole functions as a planetary energy processing system. It creates pathways for high energy electrons to flow “downhill” that would not exist on an Earth devoid of life. The complex, ordered and evolving realm of living things is thus viewed as an apparatus to facilitate electron flow.
The biosphere can thus be regarded as a fourth geosphere, one of independent planetary significance alongside the lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. Lest one suspect that the biosphere is insignificant compared to those other geospheres, consider that the biosphere is responsible for creating Earth’s oxygen environment. It is no slight, trivial thing.
In the modern biosphere, most of the high energy electrons transduced through chemistry originate via photosynthesis, the process that oxygenated our atmosphere. However, photosynthesis was a secondary development that arose after life was well underway. Metabolism-First proposes that the original source of high energy electrons powering the biosphere are those found in the upwelling chemicals of sub-oceanic hydrothermal vents. These drove the first generation of life into existence, the chemotrophic organisms that still exist in vent environments today. Later, photosynthetic organisms plugged a new source of electrons into that pre-existing metabolic engine, while leaving that engine largely intact.
Metabolism, the energy processing pathways utilized by life, is to a surprising extent universal. With certain informative partial exceptions, all lifeforms utilize variations of a single chemical cycle, the TCA cycle, to both build up and break down biomass. Besides being nearly universal, TCA is also central. It is at once the starting point for all biosynthesis and the endpoint of all chemical breakdown utilized for energy production. TFG proposes that metabolism is continuous with pre-life geochemistry: the means by which electrons found a way to move downhill in hydrothermal vents initiated reaction patterns that were later consolidated by Darwinian evolution.
The initial chemical stages leading to the biosphere can regarded as a process similar to that of a lightning bolt, although operating over a much longer time scale and utilizing chemical networks rather than a plasma channel. As many scientists have noted, when there is an unresolved energy differential in a system, that system has a tendency to reorganize in such a way as to resolve the differential. Electrons concentrated in a thundercloud are driven to return to ground by strong electrical forces, but they cannot immediately do so because air is an excellent insulator. Ionized air, however, conducts electricity well, and lightning is initiated by poorly understood processes that ionize a small area of physical space. Electrons flow into that region, producing heat, which further ionizes air, allowing more electron to flow, producing more heat and more ionization. In short order, electron flow cuts a plasma channel through the atmosphere, in the form of a bolt of lightning.
The process by which a minute area of ionized atmosphere leads to accelerating ionization can be regarded as a form of autocatalysis. An autocatalyst (broadly speaking) is something that creates more of itself. Fire is another example. The term, however, was invented to describe processes in chemistry. In Metabolism-First, chemical autocatalysis was a primary process initiating biosphere formation.
The story goes like this: Electrons in upwelling magma reside at a higher energy level than those in the oceanic fluids that magma encounters. This yields an energy differential that, like the electrons in a thundercloud, has no efficient means of resolution. A small quantity of electrons would nonetheless flow downhill through ambient geochemistry. It is a peculiarity of the non-oxygenated vent environment that downhill electron flow favors the formation of molecules containing multiple carbons. (In the modern, oxygenated environment, such “anabolism” requires energy, but that was not originally the case.) As the initial, limited electron flow elaborated a variety of organic chemicals, autocatalytic reaction pathways arose.
An autocatalytic chemical reaction pathway is one where chemical products of that pathway enhance the rate of reactions that produce them. This positive feedback effect channels an exponentially increasing total flow of energy and matter through the autocatalytic network.
As chemical synthesis driven by electron energy increased, random chemistry led to the discovery” of new and more efficient autocatalysts. These “better” autocatalysts would “outcompete” less efficient ones, yielding a form of natural selection in mere chemistry. Eventually, stable, cyclic forms of autocatalysis arose, and this was the recognizable beginning of the biosphere.
Readers of Jeremy England will recognize that this description is reminiscent of the concept of dissipative adaptation, in which systems reorganize to enhance energy flow by increasing energy dissipation. It is tempting to generalize from the findings in non-equilibrium thermodynamics utilized by England and others to conclude that the chemical reorganization just described was driven by the same processes. However, none of the theorems utilized in non-equilibrium thermodynamics can as yet address flows of chemicals in networks. Without disagreeing on the thermodynamics of dissipative adaptation, TFG focuses instead on the kinetics of autocatalysis. The result is a theory grounded in phase transitions. Indeed, phase transitions are the central idea of the book, but the chapter that addresses it in detail, chapter 7, is difficult to follow. It was initially a desire to understand this difficult idea that caused me to write my own popular science “translation.”
Simply put, phase transitions moving in the cooling direction, such as from liquid to ice, result in increased local order. They do so by means of cooperative effects between individual elements that autocatalyze their way into a sudden change of state. The result of a completed cooling-direction phase transition is a new substance made from the same matter but possessing altogether different properties, and residing at a state of decreased local entropy. The grand underlying idea of TFG is that the biosphere came into a being as a series of phase transitions within the reaction space of organic chemistry, leading to steadily increasing levels of order and information density.
Note that Darwinian selection itself is a form of autocatalysis, because a mutation that produces an incrementally more successful organism causes more of itself to be produced as that organism’s descendants flourish. Thus, one primary thesis of this book can be boiled down to Darwinian selection is autocatalytic, but it was not the only selective autocatalytic process involved in the origin of life.
This is a very grand idea, and it is one not yet entirely fleshed out. And yet, if one follows the argument intuitively, it leads to shivers and glimmers of understanding, a deep intellectual frisson. (Caveat: beautiful ideas that cause intellectual shivers are not necessarily true.)
There are several conceptual stages between phase transitions in the manner of water becoming ice and those hypothesized to have formed the biosphere. Phase changes in solid matter are called equilibrium phase transitions. When they occur in more dynamic, non-equilibrium environments, they are called non-equilibrium phase transitions. The initiation of a lightning bolt and the formation of a hurricane are both examples of such non-equilibrium phase transitions.
The above two categories of transition occur in the context of energy release. However, in recent decades it has become clear that phase transitions are a much more general phenomenon, occurring in such widely dispersed areas as bird flock behavior, game theory problems, economic recessions, social dynamics, traffic patterns and many others. Similar mathematics underlies all these processes.
Utilizing the phase transition paradigm, one can see continuity between the stages of matter condensation in the early universe, the formation of planets, autocatalysis in hydrothermal vents and the successive grand transitions of biogenesis. The biosphere, seen in this way, is a “merely” a novel state of matter.
TFG sees phase transitions in the formation of the several layers of metabolism, the development of RNA replication, the creation of a universal genetic code, and the movement from prokaryote to eukaryote to multicellularity to superorganismal structures. It is indeed a cosmic viewpoint.
A related concept is that of modularity; in particular, TFG proposes that phase transitions naturally lead to the creation of successive modules stacked within one another, each one having achieved stability before the next one occurs. Modularity has been an interest of biologists for decades, and TFG provides an explanation for its occurrence and functionality via ideas drawn from the field of control theory.
One specific idea that often dominates discussion of TFG is in fact offered only tentatively by the authors. This is the proposition that the reverse TCA cycle, still seen in certain anaerobic prokaryotes, was the primordial energy transmission cycle; that it arose as an optimum in geochemistry. Chapters 4 and 6 of the TFG promote this idea in detail, while at the same time admitting it may be problematic. Those chapters, in a sense, are more important for the system of reasoning they develop than for specific claims. They outline a research program: When analyzing the biosphere, look for islands of stability linked by narrow bridges.
One fascinating chapter, Chapter 5, analyzes regularities in the genetic code to hint at pre-code processes. This discussion illustrates that replication is not an on-off mechanism. Early RNA copying and protein translation from RNA would have been highly inaccurate, leading to suites of outcomes rather than single chemicals. Analysis of the stages of this process illustrate a continuous gradient between chemical autocatalysis in networks and increasingly accurate replication processes. Only after a long period of development did precise translation “precipitate out,” initiating modern Darwinian selection. This coincides with the development of true individuality, a unique feature of the type of matter organization found in the biosphere, although one that is itself subtle and multilayered.
It should be noted that Metabolism-First is not the dominant view of the origin of life. That distinction goes to the RNA World hypothesis. TFG can be regarded as an extended argument against the idea that RNA replication was the initial step in biosphere formation. One may describe this as “replication-first,” “genetic-first,” “control-first” or “individuality-first.” TFG agrees that at some point RNA replication took on a dominant role. However, it argues (to my mind effectively) that RNA could not form in sufficient quantities to produce any meaningful effect until its precursors were present in high and stable concentrations. In turn, this requires that their production was part of a stable, energy-driven chemical network. Precursors of RNA would in this view have arisen first as autocatalysts, emerging out of the network of primeval metabolism, increasing their own concentration by facilitating the reactions that produced them. Only after high levels of nucleotides were sustained in this way could RNA formation and replication become a significant process. Even then, true individuality could emerge only after the onset of precise transcription and translation, which, as already noted, came into being after many intermediate stages lacking such precision.
An awe-inspiring consequence of the TFG analysis is that, under appropriate conditions, the origin of life might be a deterministic process. One way to say this is that “the early Earth was unstable, and it relaxed into life.” Lightning bolts are inevitable once enough charge has built up, even though their exact paths owe a great deal to chance. A rock on top of a mountain will eventually fall; water in an alpine lake will find its way to the sea; and any planet with plate tectonics and a liquid ocean will tend to create a biosphere.
TFG is a complex text, not always ideally organized, and often difficult to follow. And yet, for those who take the time to read it, it will yield tremendous intellectual challenges and rewards.
Steven Bratman, author of Spontaneous Order and the Origin of Life
For the remainder of this review, I’ll refer to the book as TFG, standing for The Fourth Geosphere.
Like everything coming out of the Santa Fe Institute, TFG is quite multidisciplinary. While I have some background in organic chemistry, evolutionary biology and physics, my fluency in those fields was inadequate to make the book an easy read. Quite the contrary: I read it through twice over a period of a year, emailed the primary author for clarifications and wrote out a long form summary. Finally, on the principle that the best way to understand anything is to try to explain it, I composed my own, popular-science level version of the text. (That book is published as Spontaneous Order and the Origin of Life.)
The theory of the origin of life expounded in TFG falls in the general category of Metabolism-First theories, an approach proposing that evolution in chemical networks preceded RNA replication. Its central claim is that the energy processing mechanism found in all living things, metabolism, is continuous with the flows of energy and chemistry in the early geochemical environment. From this perspective, RNA and its precursors arose only later, after geochemistry had attained a certain level of spontaneous organization.
This is the viewpoint underlying Jeremy England’s Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things, and Nick Lane’s The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life, both excellent books that are well worth reading. Unlike these and other versions of Metabolism-First, however, TFG is a comprehensive presentation that grounds itself in universal principles and carries its idea forward through all phases of biosphere development. It has several moving parts, all intertwined, and each one fascinating. I will try to introduce each of them here.
TFG begins by asking the reader to shift level of abstraction. Rather than focus on individual organisms and lineages, as is common in evolutionary biology, it elevates its perspective as high as an orbiting space station, and evaluates the biosphere as a planetary process. From this perspective, the particular organisms that compose the biosphere at any period in history, whether they are archaea, trilobites or wildebeest, matters little. Regardless of particular components, the biosphere as a whole functions as a planetary energy processing system. It creates pathways for high energy electrons to flow “downhill” that would not exist on an Earth devoid of life. The complex, ordered and evolving realm of living things is thus viewed as an apparatus to facilitate electron flow.
The biosphere can thus be regarded as a fourth geosphere, one of independent planetary significance alongside the lithosphere, atmosphere and hydrosphere. Lest one suspect that the biosphere is insignificant compared to those other geospheres, consider that the biosphere is responsible for creating Earth’s oxygen environment. It is no slight, trivial thing.
In the modern biosphere, most of the high energy electrons transduced through chemistry originate via photosynthesis, the process that oxygenated our atmosphere. However, photosynthesis was a secondary development that arose after life was well underway. Metabolism-First proposes that the original source of high energy electrons powering the biosphere are those found in the upwelling chemicals of sub-oceanic hydrothermal vents. These drove the first generation of life into existence, the chemotrophic organisms that still exist in vent environments today. Later, photosynthetic organisms plugged a new source of electrons into that pre-existing metabolic engine, while leaving that engine largely intact.
Metabolism, the energy processing pathways utilized by life, is to a surprising extent universal. With certain informative partial exceptions, all lifeforms utilize variations of a single chemical cycle, the TCA cycle, to both build up and break down biomass. Besides being nearly universal, TCA is also central. It is at once the starting point for all biosynthesis and the endpoint of all chemical breakdown utilized for energy production. TFG proposes that metabolism is continuous with pre-life geochemistry: the means by which electrons found a way to move downhill in hydrothermal vents initiated reaction patterns that were later consolidated by Darwinian evolution.
The initial chemical stages leading to the biosphere can regarded as a process similar to that of a lightning bolt, although operating over a much longer time scale and utilizing chemical networks rather than a plasma channel. As many scientists have noted, when there is an unresolved energy differential in a system, that system has a tendency to reorganize in such a way as to resolve the differential. Electrons concentrated in a thundercloud are driven to return to ground by strong electrical forces, but they cannot immediately do so because air is an excellent insulator. Ionized air, however, conducts electricity well, and lightning is initiated by poorly understood processes that ionize a small area of physical space. Electrons flow into that region, producing heat, which further ionizes air, allowing more electron to flow, producing more heat and more ionization. In short order, electron flow cuts a plasma channel through the atmosphere, in the form of a bolt of lightning.
The process by which a minute area of ionized atmosphere leads to accelerating ionization can be regarded as a form of autocatalysis. An autocatalyst (broadly speaking) is something that creates more of itself. Fire is another example. The term, however, was invented to describe processes in chemistry. In Metabolism-First, chemical autocatalysis was a primary process initiating biosphere formation.
The story goes like this: Electrons in upwelling magma reside at a higher energy level than those in the oceanic fluids that magma encounters. This yields an energy differential that, like the electrons in a thundercloud, has no efficient means of resolution. A small quantity of electrons would nonetheless flow downhill through ambient geochemistry. It is a peculiarity of the non-oxygenated vent environment that downhill electron flow favors the formation of molecules containing multiple carbons. (In the modern, oxygenated environment, such “anabolism” requires energy, but that was not originally the case.) As the initial, limited electron flow elaborated a variety of organic chemicals, autocatalytic reaction pathways arose.
An autocatalytic chemical reaction pathway is one where chemical products of that pathway enhance the rate of reactions that produce them. This positive feedback effect channels an exponentially increasing total flow of energy and matter through the autocatalytic network.
As chemical synthesis driven by electron energy increased, random chemistry led to the discovery” of new and more efficient autocatalysts. These “better” autocatalysts would “outcompete” less efficient ones, yielding a form of natural selection in mere chemistry. Eventually, stable, cyclic forms of autocatalysis arose, and this was the recognizable beginning of the biosphere.
Readers of Jeremy England will recognize that this description is reminiscent of the concept of dissipative adaptation, in which systems reorganize to enhance energy flow by increasing energy dissipation. It is tempting to generalize from the findings in non-equilibrium thermodynamics utilized by England and others to conclude that the chemical reorganization just described was driven by the same processes. However, none of the theorems utilized in non-equilibrium thermodynamics can as yet address flows of chemicals in networks. Without disagreeing on the thermodynamics of dissipative adaptation, TFG focuses instead on the kinetics of autocatalysis. The result is a theory grounded in phase transitions. Indeed, phase transitions are the central idea of the book, but the chapter that addresses it in detail, chapter 7, is difficult to follow. It was initially a desire to understand this difficult idea that caused me to write my own popular science “translation.”
Simply put, phase transitions moving in the cooling direction, such as from liquid to ice, result in increased local order. They do so by means of cooperative effects between individual elements that autocatalyze their way into a sudden change of state. The result of a completed cooling-direction phase transition is a new substance made from the same matter but possessing altogether different properties, and residing at a state of decreased local entropy. The grand underlying idea of TFG is that the biosphere came into a being as a series of phase transitions within the reaction space of organic chemistry, leading to steadily increasing levels of order and information density.
Note that Darwinian selection itself is a form of autocatalysis, because a mutation that produces an incrementally more successful organism causes more of itself to be produced as that organism’s descendants flourish. Thus, one primary thesis of this book can be boiled down to Darwinian selection is autocatalytic, but it was not the only selective autocatalytic process involved in the origin of life.
This is a very grand idea, and it is one not yet entirely fleshed out. And yet, if one follows the argument intuitively, it leads to shivers and glimmers of understanding, a deep intellectual frisson. (Caveat: beautiful ideas that cause intellectual shivers are not necessarily true.)
There are several conceptual stages between phase transitions in the manner of water becoming ice and those hypothesized to have formed the biosphere. Phase changes in solid matter are called equilibrium phase transitions. When they occur in more dynamic, non-equilibrium environments, they are called non-equilibrium phase transitions. The initiation of a lightning bolt and the formation of a hurricane are both examples of such non-equilibrium phase transitions.
The above two categories of transition occur in the context of energy release. However, in recent decades it has become clear that phase transitions are a much more general phenomenon, occurring in such widely dispersed areas as bird flock behavior, game theory problems, economic recessions, social dynamics, traffic patterns and many others. Similar mathematics underlies all these processes.
Utilizing the phase transition paradigm, one can see continuity between the stages of matter condensation in the early universe, the formation of planets, autocatalysis in hydrothermal vents and the successive grand transitions of biogenesis. The biosphere, seen in this way, is a “merely” a novel state of matter.
TFG sees phase transitions in the formation of the several layers of metabolism, the development of RNA replication, the creation of a universal genetic code, and the movement from prokaryote to eukaryote to multicellularity to superorganismal structures. It is indeed a cosmic viewpoint.
A related concept is that of modularity; in particular, TFG proposes that phase transitions naturally lead to the creation of successive modules stacked within one another, each one having achieved stability before the next one occurs. Modularity has been an interest of biologists for decades, and TFG provides an explanation for its occurrence and functionality via ideas drawn from the field of control theory.
One specific idea that often dominates discussion of TFG is in fact offered only tentatively by the authors. This is the proposition that the reverse TCA cycle, still seen in certain anaerobic prokaryotes, was the primordial energy transmission cycle; that it arose as an optimum in geochemistry. Chapters 4 and 6 of the TFG promote this idea in detail, while at the same time admitting it may be problematic. Those chapters, in a sense, are more important for the system of reasoning they develop than for specific claims. They outline a research program: When analyzing the biosphere, look for islands of stability linked by narrow bridges.
One fascinating chapter, Chapter 5, analyzes regularities in the genetic code to hint at pre-code processes. This discussion illustrates that replication is not an on-off mechanism. Early RNA copying and protein translation from RNA would have been highly inaccurate, leading to suites of outcomes rather than single chemicals. Analysis of the stages of this process illustrate a continuous gradient between chemical autocatalysis in networks and increasingly accurate replication processes. Only after a long period of development did precise translation “precipitate out,” initiating modern Darwinian selection. This coincides with the development of true individuality, a unique feature of the type of matter organization found in the biosphere, although one that is itself subtle and multilayered.
It should be noted that Metabolism-First is not the dominant view of the origin of life. That distinction goes to the RNA World hypothesis. TFG can be regarded as an extended argument against the idea that RNA replication was the initial step in biosphere formation. One may describe this as “replication-first,” “genetic-first,” “control-first” or “individuality-first.” TFG agrees that at some point RNA replication took on a dominant role. However, it argues (to my mind effectively) that RNA could not form in sufficient quantities to produce any meaningful effect until its precursors were present in high and stable concentrations. In turn, this requires that their production was part of a stable, energy-driven chemical network. Precursors of RNA would in this view have arisen first as autocatalysts, emerging out of the network of primeval metabolism, increasing their own concentration by facilitating the reactions that produced them. Only after high levels of nucleotides were sustained in this way could RNA formation and replication become a significant process. Even then, true individuality could emerge only after the onset of precise transcription and translation, which, as already noted, came into being after many intermediate stages lacking such precision.
An awe-inspiring consequence of the TFG analysis is that, under appropriate conditions, the origin of life might be a deterministic process. One way to say this is that “the early Earth was unstable, and it relaxed into life.” Lightning bolts are inevitable once enough charge has built up, even though their exact paths owe a great deal to chance. A rock on top of a mountain will eventually fall; water in an alpine lake will find its way to the sea; and any planet with plate tectonics and a liquid ocean will tend to create a biosphere.
TFG is a complex text, not always ideally organized, and often difficult to follow. And yet, for those who take the time to read it, it will yield tremendous intellectual challenges and rewards.
Steven Bratman, author of Spontaneous Order and the Origin of Life
January 23, 2020
It was good and informative.
February 5, 2021
This is a book for people with an advanced knowledge of organic chemistry. It offers an excellent compilation of the current state of our insights in the biochemical processes that create or maintain life and steer evolution.
The book starts with a contextual description of Linus Pauling´s integration of the periodic table of elements into quantum mechanics, to elaborate how this influenced contemporary insights in biochemical processes. Those insights led to a further mathematization of evolutionary theory where they perceive numerous algorithms that steer those cycles, which led them to postulate the existence of an "invisible hand" that directs the course of said evolutionary processes.
In the first six chapters they review the areas where several scientifically disciplines concur in their interpretation of evolutionary processes, only to deviate from this path in chapter 7 in order to formulate the shortcomings they perceive in existing models through mathematization of the sources whereupon they will base their further research.
However, as a guide to come to an understanding of the emergence of self-conscient intelligent life on Earth it falls short because the authors want to reduce and interpret all humankind through the lens of biochemical processes.
Already the used terminology "4th geosphere" indicates that the authors don´t feel much for looking outside their own field of experience in resuming their research. Where anthropologists divide the evolutionary process into the consecutive creation of a geosphere, biosphere, and a noosphere, they reduce them to four geospheres governed by the imperatives of biochemical processes and the "invisible hand" that steers the algorithms regulating them.
Despite its shortcomings, it remains an instructive guide into the world of biochemistry.
The book starts with a contextual description of Linus Pauling´s integration of the periodic table of elements into quantum mechanics, to elaborate how this influenced contemporary insights in biochemical processes. Those insights led to a further mathematization of evolutionary theory where they perceive numerous algorithms that steer those cycles, which led them to postulate the existence of an "invisible hand" that directs the course of said evolutionary processes.
In the first six chapters they review the areas where several scientifically disciplines concur in their interpretation of evolutionary processes, only to deviate from this path in chapter 7 in order to formulate the shortcomings they perceive in existing models through mathematization of the sources whereupon they will base their further research.
However, as a guide to come to an understanding of the emergence of self-conscient intelligent life on Earth it falls short because the authors want to reduce and interpret all humankind through the lens of biochemical processes.
Already the used terminology "4th geosphere" indicates that the authors don´t feel much for looking outside their own field of experience in resuming their research. Where anthropologists divide the evolutionary process into the consecutive creation of a geosphere, biosphere, and a noosphere, they reduce them to four geospheres governed by the imperatives of biochemical processes and the "invisible hand" that steers the algorithms regulating them.
Despite its shortcomings, it remains an instructive guide into the world of biochemistry.
August 5, 2020
Having a very high expectation, I feel a bit disappointed.
What I learned:
The idea itself is very interesting. The book provides a perspective towards the problem of the origin of life from the study of far-from-equilibrium system. The idea says that life emerges somehow like other natural phenomena like turbulence or lightning, in the sense that its emergence is a consequence of natural tendency in the presence of primordial earth condition, instead of an improbable miracle of unexpected movements of molecules. But also, it stressed that life is more complicated than those simpler phenomena because of the complexity of life's structure - such as hierarchy, individuality and diversity.
As a sketch towards a more complete future theory of the origin of life, the book points to metabolism as the cutting-point mechanism of life and ecological systems as the more pertinent units to talk about the matter.
Centring our view on metabolism, instead of on replicators as Darwinian approaches would like to, introduces the toolkits from science of lower levels such as chemistry and physics to the problem.
Seeing ecological systems as the basic units allows us to surpass the Darwinian perspective that is preconditioned on the individuality and the existence of replicators. This view has the advantage of being better suited to corporate with models of chemistry and physics as well. The units are more of a closed system than an organism is in terms of energy.
In other words, the book suggests a paradigm-shift from the pair of replicator and organism, to the pair of metabolism and ecosystem, which as he argues is the right level of abstraction.
The model that is introduced to explain the origin of life is phase transition, or, a cascade of phase transition on the going. In Darwinian view, the counterpart is lacked and necessity and chance are thus confusingly entangled. From the metabolic view, phase transition allows for an explanation that does not rely too much on miraculous events and thus more testable and address more directly to the problem of stability of systems, in contrast to evolutionary thinking.
Cons:
These ideas being greatly appreciated, I feel the book sometimes reiterate too much on these ideas that I cannot distinguish some paragraphs from others. The line of writing to me is sometimes confusing due to the unnecessary lengthy sentences. While the intention of rigour behind is understood, it is however incompatible with the fact that the book is only a sketch of a complete theory, the most important to which it seems to me is to convey the idea as concise and intuitive as possible.
Also, I feel the link between the models and the problem are not strongly established enough. The toy models introduced from non-equilibrium study need some elaborations to make it more relevant. From a background of mathematics, I feel the writing about these models are not the right level of abstraction to deal with the life science (not the model but the writing). The better approach would be to extract the semantic of the proofs and formalism and put it in the context of biology, so that we readers could better grasp the intended correspondence between the model and the reality.
What I learned:
The idea itself is very interesting. The book provides a perspective towards the problem of the origin of life from the study of far-from-equilibrium system. The idea says that life emerges somehow like other natural phenomena like turbulence or lightning, in the sense that its emergence is a consequence of natural tendency in the presence of primordial earth condition, instead of an improbable miracle of unexpected movements of molecules. But also, it stressed that life is more complicated than those simpler phenomena because of the complexity of life's structure - such as hierarchy, individuality and diversity.
As a sketch towards a more complete future theory of the origin of life, the book points to metabolism as the cutting-point mechanism of life and ecological systems as the more pertinent units to talk about the matter.
Centring our view on metabolism, instead of on replicators as Darwinian approaches would like to, introduces the toolkits from science of lower levels such as chemistry and physics to the problem.
Seeing ecological systems as the basic units allows us to surpass the Darwinian perspective that is preconditioned on the individuality and the existence of replicators. This view has the advantage of being better suited to corporate with models of chemistry and physics as well. The units are more of a closed system than an organism is in terms of energy.
In other words, the book suggests a paradigm-shift from the pair of replicator and organism, to the pair of metabolism and ecosystem, which as he argues is the right level of abstraction.
The model that is introduced to explain the origin of life is phase transition, or, a cascade of phase transition on the going. In Darwinian view, the counterpart is lacked and necessity and chance are thus confusingly entangled. From the metabolic view, phase transition allows for an explanation that does not rely too much on miraculous events and thus more testable and address more directly to the problem of stability of systems, in contrast to evolutionary thinking.
Cons:
These ideas being greatly appreciated, I feel the book sometimes reiterate too much on these ideas that I cannot distinguish some paragraphs from others. The line of writing to me is sometimes confusing due to the unnecessary lengthy sentences. While the intention of rigour behind is understood, it is however incompatible with the fact that the book is only a sketch of a complete theory, the most important to which it seems to me is to convey the idea as concise and intuitive as possible.
Also, I feel the link between the models and the problem are not strongly established enough. The toy models introduced from non-equilibrium study need some elaborations to make it more relevant. From a background of mathematics, I feel the writing about these models are not the right level of abstraction to deal with the life science (not the model but the writing). The better approach would be to extract the semantic of the proofs and formalism and put it in the context of biology, so that we readers could better grasp the intended correspondence between the model and the reality.
June 21, 2023
One of the most impressive and difficult books I've ever read.
Start with Nick Lane's "The Vital Question", then read this if you're interested in the interdisciplinary geochembiophysical mechanics of the origins of life.
Start with Nick Lane's "The Vital Question", then read this if you're interested in the interdisciplinary geochembiophysical mechanics of the origins of life.
Want to read
January 8, 2023QH325 .S56 2016 Steenbock library
Want to read
August 13, 2018I am probably too dumb and life is too short--at least for now. Will come back to this maybe.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews