
First Support for a Physics Theory of Life - robinhouston
https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-support-for-a-physics-theory-of-life-20170726/
======
sleavey
The article seems to suggest he's simulating a "soup" of many different
molecules and seeing which combinations lead to sustained reactions. Nick
Lane's book "The Vital Question" [1] discounts the primordial soup idea (that
life arose in tidal pools or streams near volcanos due to the right chemical
mixture being present in the water at that time) and suggests underwater
alkaline hydrothermal vents as the location of the first formation of life.
The hydrothermal vents produced (see also his recent paper [2]) alkaline
fluids which mixed with acidic seawater within micropores provided by the
geological structures of a particular type of vent. This, he hypothesises, led
to proton gradients which are essential for life.

Of course, both these guys are experts at the top of their fields, at
respected institutes. I possess neither of those qualities.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-
Comp...](https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-
Complex/dp/0393088812)

[2] [http://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-
hydro...](http://nick-lane.net/publications/origin-life-alkaline-hydrothermal-
vents-2/)

------
meri_dian
>"The existence of life is no mystery or lucky break, he told Quanta in 2014,
but rather follows from general physical principles and “should be as
unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”"

This makes sense. Life exists here on earth, I believe it got here through
natural processes, and so it seems that life should be expected in the right
circumstances.

But this begs the question, has life arisen independently from other existing
life in the last 4 billion years? All known life shares the same fundamental
genetic code and appears to descend from a single common ancestor. Are we to
believe that the founder population of all life on earth, from which the GCA
hailed, is the only instance of life on earth arising directly from inanimate
matter? Or has life arisen independently between 4 billion years ago and now,
just to be out-competed by existing life forms? Or were conditions just right
4 billion years ago to allow for the spontaneous generation of local-entropy
reducing molecular agents (which evolved into life), and ever since conditions
have been wrong for the generation of life?

~~~
lend000
If self-replicating organisms did spontaneously emerge multiple times in
history (which is possible, although I think many, including England,
overestimate the statistical likelihood of complex things coming together so
perfectly), they were likely eaten immediately by more refined life forms.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis)

~~~
hetman
I never understood this line of thinking (it kind of reminds me of the sci-fi
trope of the killer virus from outer space). In order for two life forms to be
able to interact significantly at a bio-chemical level (let alone eat each
other), one would imagine their bio-chemistry would have to be highly
compatible. That seems unlikely of lifeforms arising from independent
abiogenesis events.

~~~
gnaritas
> That seems unlikely of lifeforms arising from independent abiogenesis
> events.

Not at all, you're presuming there are many different ways life could work,
that might not be the case at all. It's entirely possible there's only one or
very few possible recipes for life so no matter how many abiogenesis events
occur, they produce the same kind of life.

A simple analogy, wood burns, fire is fire, you don't expect every different
occurrence of fire in nature to produce a new and incompatible type of fire.
Life could be the same, it could be that anywhere carbon based life forms it's
basically the same basic recipe and thus biologically compatible with all
other forms of carbon based life.

~~~
didgeoridoo
> It's entirely possible there's only one or very few possible recipes for
> life so no matter how many abiogenesis events occur, they produce the same
> kind of life.

Presumably this is even MORE likely if the independent lifeforms both emerged
in similar physical & chemical environments.

~~~
gnaritas
Agreed.

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lend000
Regarding the latter half of this article, I see no reason why there is a need
to distinguish information processing from evolution -- it just so happens
that complex self-replicating structures can compete better when they respond
to information, and so they are evolutionarily favored.

The real challenge is modeling evolution mathematically. I don't see why
Darwinian evolution is often considered a property of life, as opposed to life
being the prime example of the fundamental, logical algorithm of evolution.
That is, any self-replicating, changing system will tend toward
competitiveness in its environment.

------
strainer
As a fair example of structure coalescing from randomness and simple physics,I
have to hawk this* example called 'bloop' from my web 3d physics project. It
is a cloud of gravitating bodies with a simple 'sticky' force between close
neighbours, the strength of which varies like breeze. I find it reminiscent of
the old 'bag in the wind' video.

[*]
[https://strainer.github.io/fancy/#12](https://strainer.github.io/fancy/#12)

I come upon things like this while playing with and debugging different
forces. One very early, imploding world with simple gravity, created a
surprising 'aleph-like' blob of flickering shapely artifacts. It blew my socks
off but it was before proper version control and I'd have to do archeology to
recreate it. Better to keep improving the physics and see what can pop up next
...

~~~
rytill
Cool demo. Reminds me of a music visualizer.

~~~
strainer
Thanks. Adding sounds is on my list :)

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svachalek
Here's a key paragraph that really walks back a lot of the language in the
first half of the article. Here he's just stating physics may be much
friendlier to the initial conditions for abiogenesis than previously believed:

“In the short term, I’m not saying this tells me a lot about what’s going in a
biological system, nor even claiming that this is necessarily telling us where
life as we know it came from,” he said. Both questions are “a fraught mess”
based on “fragmentary evidence,” that, he said, “I am inclined to steer clear
of for now.” He is rather suggesting that in the tool kit of the first life-
or proto-life-forms, “maybe there’s more that you can get for free, and then
you can optimize it using the Darwinian mechanism.”

~~~
m_mueller
I still like the article a lot, it gives the right amount of details to get me
interested in the topic and starting a hunt for information on google scholar.

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graycat
> He further showed that this statistical tendency to dissipate energy might
> foster self-replication. (As he explained it in 2014, “A great way of
> dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”)

Then the atoms will become _happy_ and try to do more of that to become more
_happy_?

My BS detector is screaming loudly.

First, this stuff about the second law of thermodynamics leaves me cold:

> the second law of thermodynamics, which says that energy constantly spreads
> and the entropy of the universe always increases. (The second law is true
> because there are more ways for energy to be spread out among particles than
> to be concentrated, so as particles move around and interact, the odds favor
> their energy becoming increasingly shared.)

BS. That argument has a huge, hidden assumption, that we are looking at an
inert gas in a bottle. So, there are no chemical reactions, etc. Then there
are lots of possible configurations.

Try that with some sticky ping pong balls and soon will have just a solid
clump with only configuration. Try that with a lot of billiard balls, and soon
they will arrange themselves on the bottom of the container with a lot of
hexagons and tetrahedra, that is, with a relatively few number of
configurations.

So, to discuss how life began, let's f'get about the second law.

Instead, we know that we can cook chemicals and get amino acids. Why? Because
get chemical reactions where the atoms stick together, and it would take
energy to split them apart again. Then if we cook for a few hundred million
more years, we can get a configuration that can consume energy from its
environment and reproduce itself. Then we are off to the races because what
took a billion years to do the first time now just takes the time to
reproduce. Then with small errors in the reproduction process and lots of
reproduction, we get forms of life that are better at extracting energy from
the environment and reproduce faster; soon that life form becomes relatively
common, in that sense, dominates. Eventually we get a very creative farmer and
expert with domestic animals, stone, wood, and metal with a very fertile wife,
and they have lots of kids who also do really well.

There are some questions and issues, but IMHO the model for the second law of
inert atoms of a gas in a bottle is nearly irrelevant.

------
RangerScience
I wonder if there's a way to adapt this to AI / machine learning. To my
uneducated eye, there's a distinct similarity between the "breaking and
reforming" of [simulated] physical bonds, and the training of a neural net.

If you consider your training data (or other "external sensors") as the
environmental forcing factors... do you process "information" instead of
"energy"?

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empath75
When I was in vegas, the thought occurred to me that cities were structures
designed to dissipate economic energy.

Money flows into vegas through the big casinos and gradually works its way out
through the rest of the city, forming vortexes and whirlpools of economic
activity, of lower and lower intensity as you move out from the city center,
until it gradually fades out into desert.

~~~
RangerScience
Interesting. How does this interact with the idea of trickle-down economics?

~~~
gonvaled
Trickle down is a completely uninteresting tautology: money is used by the
wealthy, so it "trickles down".

The more interesting question is if, while tricling down, people improve their
life quality.

Far from true.

~~~
RangerScience
Oh I agree!

But the idea of wealth concentration that then tapers out as a function of
distance from the city center bears at least a superficial resemblance.

Perhaps why one works and the other doesn't is that personal wealth
accumulation IS like water: it'll get stuck in local maxima, etc - whereas
city wealth accumulation is more like sand; as it piles on top you get
landslides that distribute.

------
ABCLAW
Forgive me if I'm dense, but I read the article twice and don't see how this
is anything more than a well known fact getting some science journalism
coverage to seem important. Is the big news here that someone in physics has
applied a crude model to the very well understood theory of abiogenesis? We've
literally ran this experiment in vitro. With real chemicals.

I'm not sure how the entropic basis of the theory provides any insight beyond
'capacity for work can generate things that have capacity for work', which we
knew. The big question isn't, and wasn't, whether a system with primordial
chemicals could generate self-replicating reactions and structures - you could
figure that out by looking in a mirror.

It's what those primordial cycles actually were.

Edit: Looks like the dude's former supervisor working in chem isn't full of
shit like the rest of the article is: Shakhnovich said, but “Jeremy’s work
represents potentially interesting exercises in non-equilibrium statistical
mechanics of simple abstract systems.” Any claims that it has to do with
biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless
speculations.”

TLDR - might be interesting in niche modeling field, but has nothing to do
with origins of life.

~~~
joobus
> a system with primordial chemicals could generate self-replicating reactions
> and structures - you could figure that out by looking in a mirror

Only if you require no evidence, and no verifiable, independently confirmed
experiments to back up your claim. What you said is basically the scientist's
version of intelligent design at this point.

~~~
xenadu02
There have been plenty of experiments showing that the building blocks of life
will spontaneously self-assemble under the right conditions. We have now
confirmed that comets and other bodies in space contain complex molecules such
as hydrocarbons.

There are also plenty of experiments demonstrating that certain structures
self-assemble and even "replicate" (for some definition of replicate) under
the right conditions, purely as a function of their molecular structure.

There is no conclusive proof... but certainly everything we've discovered to
date supports abiogenesis of life given the right conditions and a few 100
million years for many trillions of attempts. It is likely that the first
"life" wasn't life as we would define it, more like a prion: a self-
replicating molecule built out of amino acids dumped on Earth from meteorite
and comet impacts. The first true "life" was probably exceedingly simple and
lived off chemical reactions around hydrothermal vents.

~~~
oldandtired
No conclusive proof? No proof at all.

Go and listen to James Tour and his video on the problems of just getting the
right pre-life chemical synthesis to occur. He is a organic chemist (one of
the top in the world) and he talks about each of the incompatible processes
between each step.

I would be more inclined to take his word for it than a biologist (of any
stripe). Abiogenesis seems to be the least likely scenario in the formation of
life (as in close to 0 as to make no difference) irrespective of the amount of
time that is allocated.

~~~
gnaritas
> Abiogenesis seems to be the least likely scenario in the formation of life

Yet we know it happened, because life exists, and it didn't spring from magic
so it must have sprung from non-life. Random chance is a hell of a search
algorithm, abiogenesis is simply the inevitable outcome randomly trying every
possible combination over hundreds of millions of years. There are no more
likely scenarios.

~~~
oldandtired
Just because we know something is, does not mean know why. You make a very
broad leap to say that there are only two possibilities - magic and
abiogenesis - and that one of those possibilities doesn't exist.

There are three broad classifications of philosophical belief - the universe
is all there is and there is no non-physical component, that the universe is
and has a non-physical component (it is alive, etc) and that there is a
creator who is separate from the universe and that creator made the universe.

Within that context, the three can be split into two variations, the universe
(with or without a non-physical component) is eternal (steady state or cyclic)
and an eternal creator who has made a finite lifespan universe.

Abiogenesis can arise in one of those three variations, in the other two,
either the universe creates life as apart of its functionality (its non-
physical attributes) or there is a creator that has designed and set in motion
life.

Please note that abiogenesis is a completely different subject to any
evolutionary model that people may subscribe to.

You can argue all you like about the variations above but you cannot use
science to determine the "truth" of which variety you personally believe in.
That is a metaphysical/philosophical/religious debate that is outside of the
domain of science.

So, where does that leave us in this discussion? Well, it says that you have
not given much thought to your point of view in such a way that you are able
to logically argue its merit. In which case, I would suggest that you might
like to flesh out your arguments because as they stand, the arguments you
present are extremely weak and illogical.

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joobus
> Since then, England, a 35-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts
> Institute of Technology, has been testing aspects of his idea in computer
> simulations.

Claiming life was created because a computer said so will convince no one
requiring physical proof. The bar for evidence is too low with this
experiment.

~~~
m_mueller
But it could at some point provide the key ingredients and conditions to
replicate it. Lacking a laboratory of Earth's scale one could use
supercomputing (at some point, we're not there yet) to figure out necessary
and sufficient conditions, after which hopefully any chemistry student could
replicate in the lab with that knowledge. Seems sci-fi now, but I could
imagine this happening in a few decades.

