10 ms·

Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe?

451 points by harscoat 3y ago

m3kw9 3y ago
Life else where outside the solar system is all but certain, we just need proof, just like an extra star beyond what we can see, we can’t see it but we know is there
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Seems like a common theme these days, to find some theory of math/physics to explain life/evolution/consciousness E/Acc -> Second law of thermodynamics leads to 'life' as way of increasing entropy. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... Constructor Theory -> A constructor is an entity that can cause the task to occur while retaining the ability to cause it again. - and Life is constructors. Assembly Theory -> Lee Cronin. Assembly Theory defines all objects by their capacity to be assembled or broken down using minimal paths. https://iai.tv/articles/a-new-theory-of-matter-may-help-explain-life-lee-cronin-auid-2656 https://iai.tv/articles/a-new-theory-of-matter-may-help-expl... Whatever Donald Hoffman is saying lately. Which might not be about underlying layers, just how we can't know them. etc...
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  It's almost teleological. Many people have ruled out God, but still want there to be purpose or direction.
  - monkaiju 3y ago
    Thats exactly what it is i think. Theyre unable to find meaning in the real world and need an equally mystical hand waivey narrative
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Not my intention to toss science out the window. All theories are just ideas or musings in the beginning. Until they are further defined, researched and proven. Things like the earth circling the sun, sounded crazy at first. It also went against god. If all independent 'thoughts' are diss-allowed because only "god" can provide the answers, then we'd still be living in trees wondering why the sun comes up. How do you think we have anything, without someone, at some point, asking 'how does this work?'.
      - monkaiju 3y ago
        Did you respond to the intended comment? Seems unrelated to mine
        FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        The parent of yours was about God, and you seemed to agree with that one. Seemed related. Weren't you equating someone's proposed theory as hand wavy mysticism, because of a lack of meaning in their lives? But maybe not. I could me reading too much into it. Apologies.
mjburgess 3y ago
This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.
- Cacti 3y ago
  There’s lots of crap on Arxiv.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Wait, you mean I can use Arxiv as a blog instead of Drupal or Medium? Hold me beer!
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    Yep. For example, a few years ago a "cryptography researcher" posted in arXiv a new method to factorize numbers. The fist 10 page were an explanation of the rule that if the sum of the digits of N is a multiple of 3, then N is a multiple of 3. Then he explained something more interesting but the details were uninteligible. I skeemed the second part and I thought it was wrong, but after reading the firt part I didn't bother to verify all the details.
- AIorNot 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - AIorNot 3y ago
    Also see: https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Complexity_Hordjik_Formatted.pdf https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Complex...
  - master-lincoln 3y ago
    You do not seem to address the parent comment at all. Why use the reply button instead of starting a new top level comment thread?
cscheid 3y ago
Time to break out John Baez's checklist: https://archive.org/details/TheCrackpotIndex https://archive.org/details/TheCrackpotIndex
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Maybe better link, more readable : https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
- tgv 3y ago
  Never heard of it, but it seems to give a good digest of the format. Unfortunately, it seems aimed at non-academic crackpots. It doesn't even award points for vacuous mentioning Schrödinger or Kant.
  - jyounker 3y ago
    I was really turned off by the mention of Kant at first, but reading on it's relevant to the discussion. This is a real scientist applying Kant's idea to real phenomena in a useful way. Please read the paper in detail.
    - tgv 3y ago
      I had glossed it, and the part where they make a surprise move to Kant, is ... not very convincing. The way they describe it doesn't make sense. It's not as if there's any proof that a "Whole" is life or vice versa. It's just one of their assumptions. If we take their writing as some form of evidence for it, they claim children inherit your Parts, but that's not true. They also imply that Parts cannot exist outside the Whole, which is patently false when taken literally. But in the loose sense in which they seem to use it, I could totally see a piano as a Whole: keys, snares, hammers, sound board, it doesn't make sense outside a piano. Also, notable features of life aren't included nor implied by the concept Whole. They also call Collectively Autocatalytic Sets an "established mathematical theory", but it's a mathematical property that can be true of some domain. It doesn't prove anything. There aren't any proofs involving that property in the paper either. Later they call it a "chemical reaction system," which seems to be more to the point, but there are so many of those. It's just another idea, and not an original one either. Wikipedia: "Autocatalytic sets constitute just one of several current theories of life." That Autocatalytic sets by itself isn't enough to explain life may be a point, but there's no reason to assume they've found the magical ingredient in Kant.
ta8645 3y ago
Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  "expected phase transition" seems a loaded phrasing, and implies a deterministic evolution, which I really don't think we should assume.
  - jyounker 3y ago
    An expected phase transition in this context is stochastic. The transition to order is expected, and there are bulk properties that are the same on each run, but the exact details differ each time.
- haolez 3y ago
  In the context of the universe, I wouldn't call it "intelligence" versus "artificial intelligence". I would call it "organic intelligence" vs "inorganic intelligence".
  - neom 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism :)
    - junon 3y ago
      Not quite sure this is what GP meant.
  - irrational 3y ago
    http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.sh...
  - Koshkin 3y ago
asow92 3y ago
> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature. This sentiment has always made me question when people say things are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then aren't they naturally occurring? edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.
- Drakim 3y ago
  It makes more sense when you realize that unnatural and artificial are societal words akin to immoral or bad. Within that context they are perfectly crumulent words, it's only when we wish to have them be objective outside humanity that they don't make sense anymore.
  - Koshkin 3y ago
    > societal words Indeed, all words are "societal." The meaning(s) of a word is/are always a matter of convention (or tradition).
- mc32 3y ago
  Ok, maybe synthetic is a better word for many instances of their use. As in synthesized with the aid human intervention.
  - xixixao 3y ago
    In which case coral reefs are also synthetic :)
    - simiones 3y ago
      Most coral reefs predate human intervention by a few hundred million years.
  - GoldenRacer 3y ago
    Where exactly is the line drawn for how much and what type of human intervention is required? When I cook food, human intervention is causing chemical reactions that change the composition of the food. I doubt many people consider grill marks to be unnatural or synthetic.
schnitzelstoat 3y ago
I think life is going to be quite common as it seems it just requires liquid water and an extremely common type of rock in order to form alkaline hydro-thermic vents. It appears that life developed quite quickly in this manner after the formation of the Earth. The leap from bacteria and archaea to eukaryotes, however, took billions of years. So complex life may be rare.
- mavili 3y ago
  Should be so common, right? Yet we're struggling to find any form of life. Not complex, just anything that lives.
  - simiones 3y ago
    I don't think we have any tools that could possibly detect bacterial life anywhere where we don't have a physical presence at the moment. That is, even if Venus were teeming with simple life on every square cm, I don't think any of our instruments could pick it up unless we send a probe to collect and analyze samples. So, at the moment we have no hope of detecting this type of life outside the solar system even if it were universal.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      We've got photos from the surface of Venus: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-... It's visibly not covered in moss, fungus, grasses, algae, slime. On Earth we talk about hot hydrothermal vents underwater: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-vents.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-vent... - this says "the Pompeii worm [...] is one of the most heat-resistant multicellular animals on the planet, able to withstand temperature spikes of over 80°C. 'Most animals can't cope with anything over 40°C. Very close to the hot fluid, there are typically only microorganisms. These can survive in temperatures up to around 120°C,' explains Maggie." The surface of Venus averages 462°C. Okay we won't know for sure unless we collect samples, but we do know any life would have to be heat resistant beyond anything we know of - beyond what our metal space probes could tolerate - and invisible to the naked camera even in 'teeming' quantities, and leaving no trace of waste gasses in the atmosphere which we can detect remotely. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkMwv9EYQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkMwv9EYQQ - Venera: The Incredible Probe that the Soviets Sent to Venus ]
zenkat 3y ago
I was fascinated by "At Home In The Universe" back in the 90s. But this seems like a rehashing of the same ideas, without new evidence or theory. Anything new here?
TravisCooper 3y ago
If you have an erroneous view of life and it's origins on earth, you'll come up with variations of this type of thinking. However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible. Entropy is increasing.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  > However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible. How else could it have evolved?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- spuz 3y ago
  Increase in entropy does not imply decrease in complexity. Actually physicists believe the relationship between entropy and complexity is more of a bell shape curve. https://youtu.be/MTFY0H4EZx4 https://youtu.be/MTFY0H4EZx4
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Oh look, another person utterly mangling the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics. Evolution is in no way in contradiction to the 2nd law.
hamburga 3y ago
I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram’s YouTube lectures on his new physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in the big picture of physics. His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity and internal structure. Life is not binary.
- delichon 3y ago
  Ok. What's an example of something low but non-zero on the spectrum of life? I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly "life-like".
  - Balgair 3y ago
    Viruses? New understandings of mega-viruses have let us to believe that the line is really quite fuzzy. Some of these larger viruses have double stranded DNA, some have ribosome like functions, some have ERs, etc. Kinda like a cell, but missing random parts that make them truly alive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus
    - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
      Potentially crystals as well. While we don't typically consider them part of "biology" there are some good arguments for including them as a form of life.
    - beacon294 3y ago
      You can also consider a virus a loosely coupled form, which really increases the size of the virus, since it requires its platform to propagate.
  - hamburga 3y ago
    All the ingredients of the primordial soup that bacteria grew from - water, methane, carbohydrates.
mavili 3y ago
There is nothing "expected" in a truly random universe. You cannot have your cake and eat it, there is either some sort of 'order' in the universe or there is none. You cannot place forms of order where it suits you but reject it when it doesn't.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  There are expectations even with random. E.g. if you have a truly random dice and you throw it millions of times you would expect the occurrence of each number to be similarly around 1/6. So it could be argued that given laws of universe, seeding it in any state could with very high odds come to an emergence of life, which makes it to be "expected".
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Think you are conflating just random pool balls, and particles with properties. If a few hydrogen and oxygen atoms get together and form water. That is expected, even if they are bouncing around randomly. This occurs at many different scales. There is random motion of particles of air in a room, but the overall 'pressure' can be measured and be constant.
tobbe2064 3y ago
This reminds me. There was a paper published a couple of years ago and posted here on HN that actually calculated the probability of life aminoacid-based life emerging. Based on the complexity of the chain needed to start replicating. The conclusion was that it was vanishingly small in the observable universe but only close to 0 in the full universe. I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know where I can read it or remember the article I'm talking about?
- XTXinverseXTY 3y ago
  "Emergence of life in an inflationary universe"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047650
- r721 3y ago
  Probably not this one, but it's on related topic: >There’s plenty of time for evolution (2010) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016207107 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016207107
- imworkingrn 3y ago
  Not sure if there what the term for this is, but rather than looking at the probability of X happening we should rather look at the "inevitability" of X happening in the context of the environment. In my experience, even though nature looks chaotic there is a very strict order to things which has evolved over millions of years and is a result of looking for the "most optimal way" to achieve a goal. A good example might be mycelium optimizing routes to nearby resources. Another might be ant colonies creating tunnels that are effective to navigate. The problem is, in my opinion, that we do not know what the final goal is. Therefore we cannot begin to analyze the inevitability of something as us, or life in general, happening. The answer may be perhaps found in religion or some similar "greater than life" endeavor.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  "Darwinian evolution is not a sufficient theory of life (claremont.org)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20568692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20568692 I posted a comment there. They are using a very long protein instead of a short one. Nobody expect that the first functional protein is so long. Also, they are generating the protein using a "random dice" instead of assuming a short crapppy version and using "branch and prune" to find a longer and more efficient one.
dooopdoop 3y ago
[dead]
1970-01-01 3y ago
Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the math.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
  So hypothetically we observe that there is life somewhere, say beyond our ability to reach. What’s the next step beyond arguing about the math now that this is confirmed?
  - Filligree 3y ago
    Then we can stop arguing about the math.
    - awb 3y ago
      Detecting life would still be a small sample size. You’d need to detect life or rule it out on a variety of planet sizes, ages and compositions at a variety of distances around a variety of star types, ages and sizes at varying locations in the galaxy before we’d have enough data to make confident predictions.
  - 1970-01-01 3y ago
    The next step is arguing about communications. Do you trust the unforgiving universe to respond kindly? Is it a dark forest trap?
- m3kw9 3y ago
  Is hypothetical but the minuscule chance there isn’t a single cell outside of earth is almost infinitely minuscule. Is like saying to your friend “you have a chance to win the mega billions lottery”. It’s meaningless to them because they round down to that you have no chance
- m3kw9 3y ago
lachlan_gray 3y ago
It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring, gaining, branching out. So they also kind of make a nest for the simple organisms by sprawling into the void and finding habitable niches that simple organisms wouldn't reach on their own. On the time scale of technology, we began reaching out to other intelligences the second that we could, began trying to make them the second we thought we could know how. It's very reasonable to say that percolation is a defining property of life and intelligence. I also think a lot of scifi's like hyperion, neuromancer, foundation. In human writing of the future, it seems like the endgame of higher intelligence is to find or create other intelligences, and get closer to them. Then interesting things happen in the wake of that.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  I think it was a Greg Bear novel, but a line from it struck me as insightful... paraphrased badly, "even evolution is evolving".
  - SnazzyJeff 3y ago
    [dead]
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  I think the trend towards complexity is more just due to more complex things being built out of less complex ones - complexity creates/supports greater complexity, so it's a natural progression. For higher level animals complexity may also be more inherently favorable since it supports a more customized environmental "fit", and helps in the predator-prey arms race.
  - alphazard 3y ago
    Yeah this is it. It's very unlikely to see something which cannot be decomposed into similar parts come into existence. Something highly complex and irreducible. But simple things are likely to come into existence. So given that we see complicated things, we should assume that they are reducible, and that they came from simpler things. This creates the appearance of a "trend" as you say. But it's really that the complicated things couldn't exist before and now they can. Another effect is that it's possible to be more fit (in the Darwinian sense) when you are more complicated. The fittest system with complexity n is <= the fitness of a system with complexity >n. The rate at which things are destroyed is inversely proportional to their fitness (definitionally). So more complicated things can be better at staying around. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
Reading the introductory paragraph to the paper, it sounds like a rehash of Kaufmann's (very good) book "At Home in the Universe", which at this point is almost 30 years old. Not sure what this paper adds, but will read it to find out. The thesis of Kaufmann's book is that the emergence of life, given supporting conditions (variety of source chemicals in environment, sources of energy, maybe water/mixing) is all but inevitable (hence life being "at home" in the universe) rather than being some rare event. The reasoning is that when these preconditions are met there will be a variety of chemical chain reactions occurring where the product of one reaction is used as the input to the next, and eventually reaction chains that include products that act as catalysts for parts of the reaction chain. These types of reaction can be considered as a primitive metabolism - consuming certain environmental chemicals and producing others useful to the metabolism. From here to proto-cells and the beginning of evolution all it takes is some sort of cell-like container which (e.g.) need be nothing more than than something like froth on the seashore, based out of whatever may be floating on the water surface. Initial "reproduction" would be based on physical agitation (e.g wave action) breaking cells and creating new ones. Different locations would have different micro-environments with different locally occurring reaction chains and "proliferation/survival of the fittest" would be the very beginning of evolution, as those reactions better able to utilize chemical sources and support their own structure/metabolism would become more widespread. Anyway, a good book and plausible thesis in general (one could easily adapt the specifics from seashore to deep sea thermal vents etc).
- libeclipse 3y ago
  Did you see the authors of the paper?
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
    Yes - that's what I meant. Kaufmann rehashing his old work (but presumably adding something to it too).
ltbarcly3 3y ago
As soon as I see a supposed scientific paper that was typeset in Microsoft Word, I know it's going to be trash. It's not a perfect heuristic, but it's like 99%+.
- ltbarcly3 3y ago
  I love that this was downvoted because it's unlikely that anyone who downvoted it knows what scientific papers are actually typeset with. HN is now a hangout for PMs and wannabe nontechnical founders who want to feel cool.
  - ducttapecrown 3y ago
    This scientist is just older than LaTeX.
jyounker 3y ago
I went I read the first few paragraphs I thought, "Is someone ripping off Stuart Kaufmann? He was writing about this idea thirty years ago." Then I read the first author: Stuart Kaufmann. For those of you following along at home, Kaufmann has been developing the ideas here for decades. The paper is less a "here is a new idea" and much more "here is a concise summary of 50 years of work". The words and thoughts seem opaque, but this is case where they actually have concrete and specific meanings. It's worth noting too, that towards the end of the article he outlines experiments that could be used to falsify the theory. If you want a really hard-core dive into the ideas, then check out his 1993 book, "On The Origins of Order" (ISBN 978-0-19-507951-7). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order-9780195079517 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...
- jamesblonde 3y ago
  Recommend reading along with order out of chaos and anything from Prigogine in the 80s (not his last book).
- enneff 3y ago
  It doesn’t seem opaque to me and I’m no scientist. Pretty clearly expressed imo.
  - willlma 3y ago
    So you didn't look any of these terms up? Would love an explanation of * Kantian Wholes * Catalytic Closure * Constraint Closure * Spatial Closure * a first-order phase transition to molecular reproduction * phylogeny of metabolisms * template replication Thanks
    - lejoko 3y ago
      Read the article ! As it says : "We explain these concepts below."
    - enneff 3y ago
      They were explained clearly in the article I found. Although those last three are self-explanatory if you know what the individual words mean, they’re in the dictionary.
madmountaingoat 3y ago
To my laymen brain this seems very similar to Lee Cronin's Assembly theory. Curious to understand more about the difference.
- zhynn 3y ago
  My snarky take is: Assembly theory is testable, this one isn't.
- jcims 3y ago
  First thing that came to my lay mind as well. Really interesting episode with him talking about it on Lex Fridman's podcast. Feels like there's something there.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  The two concepts don't preclude each other, but they're not the same concept. Assembly theory is a theory that tells us that when we observe the complexity of something that is not unoque, we can determine probabilistically from it's complexity the likelihood of it being created by some type of active agent, mind or something. Lee continues with this to speculate a lot more (and I think he's on to something) about time being fundamental and what a mind is. It's sort of a computational complexity theory applied to intelligence. This "phase transition" hypothesis is basically saying that life is emerging in the universe in a stage akin to recombination[0] as a more stable state, and that the universe without life is a metastable state[1]. This would mean that life will ultimately absorb all matter in the universe, as if it were a phase transition the cosmological principle says that the universe is uniform[2]. It sounds like a pretty idea but I'm not really convinced, phase transitions propagate at the speed of light. An exponential curve where the transition ramps up is am interesting idea to ponder. There are existing fantastic explanations for life that exist that are very interesting that don't require the universe to undergo a phase transition. Simple entropy and the red shifting of energy explain it's existence just fine. Nevertheless, all this research and these attempts to understand what life, consciousness, minds, creative agents and all that are in the context of our universe are really fun and I think all this exploration will bear some delicious fruit. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle
jayavanth 3y ago
Can someone eli5?
huqedato 3y ago
tldr: the article proposes a new way to understand the origin of life. It combines two scientific ideas to explain how life emerges naturally as a part of the universe's evolution. Key concepts include how chemicals interact and support each other to create life, and the idea that life continuously explores new possibilities. The article challenges the traditional view of separating the physical and informational parts of living cells, suggesting a more integrated approach to studying life's beginnings and development.
johngossman 3y ago
There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet, seems good). Honestly, the details change, and the emphasis of each author, but they are all speculative and hand-wavey. Pre-paradigmatic. My favorite quote is from "Life on the Edge" by McFadden and Al-Khalili: "Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena"
- jmcqk6 3y ago
  It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are massive fields of study on their own. I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.
  - ixaxaar 3y ago
    I think the complexity researchers over the years have created a wide range of tooling for analysing complex systems across a large number of domains. Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences, network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and computational neuroscience etc. The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an amazing collections of publications in their own press. David krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20 year survey paper and an amazing read.
    - photonthug 3y ago
lutusp 3y ago
"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption. * The alternative would be to argue for a consciousness exceptionalism in "life" forms for which there is no evidence and many counterarguments. * Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy. * Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation.
- gfodor 3y ago
  That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.
  - willmadden 3y ago
    The paper defines life as a chemical reaction, which is also a heuristic. We do not know if aspects of "life" exist outside of our present understanding of physics. It's great to claw away at the edges, but I don't think anyone can answer the question "what is life?" at this point.
  - onetimeuse92304 3y ago
    Yes. You can't prove anything by proving it is the simplest explanation. The only way to prove things is to prove that it is the only possible explanation. Occam's Razor is just a useful mind tool that helps us navigate the world based on the observation that oftentimes the simplest explanation tends to be what is actually happening. BTW lots of other logical mistakes.
    - IggleSniggle 3y ago
      It's also a useful tool in science. For example, we do not know and cannot prove the one-way speed of light, only a round trip speed of light. That light travels at the same speed in all directions is just a useful application of Occam's Razor; it is effectively unknowable and no experiments have yet been devised that can falsify the alternatives. Having a set one-way speed of light is a convention
waynenator 3y ago
always liked the "Anthropic Cosmological Principle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
BurningFrog 3y ago
For something to be expected, someone must be expecting it. And to be able to expect things, you must be alive. This proves something, but I'm not sure what...
- yellow_lead 3y ago
  "I think therefore I am"
javajosh 3y ago
I personally believe that the origin of life started with something we would not recognize as such today. I imagine that it started with some long molecules in water and they have the ability to grow longer and longer. Maybe they looped around and the dynamics of the system meant that if they oriented toward the sun better they would be more numerous. Maybe if their composition was a little bit different they would acquire material from the surrounding bath more efficiently. This creates a gradient of success where the topmost molecules will do better than the bottom most molecules. Similar perturbations would allow them to acquire more material more efficiently in a pantomime of eating. Reproduction would be something as simple as breaking in half. This is of course a just so story, but it's one that I find pretty compelling. But I would like it if people thought more about what these early systems looked like rather than be so hand wavy. I think it's unlikely that any of these very early forms of life survive as they were consumed by subsequent generations. It also seems unlikely that they would form very often spontaneously such that we might find examples in nature. If such a form develops only once in a million years in a planet-wide irradiated bath, then we would have a huge challenge. Even simulating such a system to find what that structure might be. So instead I think we should use our imaginations and imagine what the simplest possible system could possibly work in that circumstance to bootstrap life.
ruffrey 3y ago
Related, lately I have been enthralled with the work of Michael Levin at Tufts. He studies things like goal directed behavior of cells and systems of cells. Here is an intro to his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU
eye-robot 3y ago
Interesting (side note) as I read all the commentary here: As people (obviously) are reacting to the particular "group psychology", or personality or culture here within HN, many commentators are heavily apologizing for not having specific links or attributions available. And I understand why now: Too many neurotic or OCD (or selfishly angry) individuals who will downvote in a heartbeat if the comment isn't to their supreme liking. So, to prove that point, this comment will (most likely) get downvoted into oblivion. I like free commentary sections that don't show off "commentary powers". I once asked a simple innocent question and the downvotes simply drove me to stop trusting anyone here... really sad, since I am an intelligent person with feelings and with curiosity and VALID opinions. Sorry that this rubs the weird people the wrong way. Just sayin'
- maksimur 3y ago
  I've noticed the same thing but I don't remember it being so prevalent up until a few years ago. This is sad and as you rightly suggest it stifles curious conversations. I had to self-censor myself a few times already.
bluenose69 3y ago
I stopped reading the article at "Life is a double miracle." As is so often the case, discussion here on HN is more compelling than the article.
tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
There is a lot of work to be done inorder to fuse the gaps between physics and biology.
api 3y ago
I've had a speculation about the Fermi paradox for years. I call it the uniform cooling hypothesis. Not sure if it's original or not. The idea builds on the present cosmological model that considers the universe to all be of the same age. If the emergence of complex life in the universe is a threshold or phase transition effect, it might not happen until the universe reaches a certain age in which all conditions are satisfied. At this point you'd have the "simultaneous" (at geologic time scales) emergence of complex life all over the place. If this were the case, what if for some reason (such as multiple overlapping factors all having to be satisfied) the standard deviation in the time dimension is actually small? In other words what if life emerges or hits certain evolutionary milestones at about the same time +/- a fairly narrow window like one million years. If that were the case then the universe would be full of things more or less about as advanced as we are, but very few that are vastly more advanced. The probability of one of those few very advanced outliers existing in, say, this galaxy might be relatively small. Intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel (which is already brutally hard) and would take millions of years even near the speed of light, so even something like a Kardashev type II or transitional type III civilization wouldn't be likely to cross between galaxies. Something like that could be out there but insanely distant and completely undetectable. We wouldn't see alien interstellar probes, starships, or techno-signatures from anything large scale enough to be detectable because for the most part these things don't exist yet. Would also imply that once we build a starship, that's about the time we should expect to encounter starships. It would be a cosmic-scale version of the principle (and apparent historical pattern) that steam engines appear when it is "steam engine time." Maybe it's just not starship time yet. If the standard deviation is very narrow, you'd have this weird interstellar trick or treat night event where the probes and starships start arriving at about the same time everywhere in the entire universe. At this point maybe everyone exchanges knowledge and technology and you have an insane explosion in complexity, sort of a cosmic Cambrian explosion, and then you get Kardashev type II and III civilizations and onward. Zoom way, way out and it looks like a sudden phase transition of the entire universe from being dominated by non-living physical processes to being dominated by living processes.
hfgjbcgjbvg 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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bentona 3y ago
If you'd like yet another somewhat similar inquiry into the information-theory-based definition of life, I'll mention Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle
ddgflorida 3y ago
No.
tulio_ribeiro 3y ago
life is not just a rare happenstance, but a predictable outcome of the universe's own chemical dance
- chrsw 3y ago
  Why do you think it's not rare? Something can be predictable and rare.
jononomo 3y ago
Life is a profound mystery -- there is absolutely no explanation for it under a materialistic/naturalistic world view. The question of the origin of life is the most fundamental and interesting question because without life no other question can even arise.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” “Plastic… asshole.” - George Carlin
mseepgood 3y ago
What's the universe's long game? Does it compete with other universes, and why does it need life to do so?
dmvjs 3y ago
im surprised that assuming life doesnt happen everywhere is the default.
martin82 3y ago
THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.
Stukauffman11 3y ago
Hi to All, and warm thanks Denis. More, thank you for the attention to this Stu - Andrea paper now online on OSF and arXiv. We will submit it soon. The origin of life field is many decades old, wonderful, and wonderfully fragmented. The two main approaches are: i. Template replication. ii. Metabolism first. I am a guilty party with respect to "metabolism first". In 1971 I realized that in a sufficiently diverse and complex chemical reaction system, self reproducing collectively autocatalytic sets would arise as a first order phase transition. Such sets have now been engineered using DNA, RNA, and peptides. A stunning set of recent results led by Joana Xavier has now demonstrated small molecule collectively autocatalytic sets, with NO DNA, RNA, or peptide polymers, in all 6700 prokaryotes. I am a co-author. Joana did all the work, entirely. It is not yet certain that these sets actually reproduce in vitro - a critical set tests to be done. If yes, I think this almost rules out a template first view. Such a template system would have to evolve RNA enzymes to catalyze some "connected metabolism" to create the building blocks for the template replicating systems. But there is no reason at all why such a connected metabolism on its own, without RNA polymer enzymes, would be collectively autocatalytic. Joana's sets create not only amino acids and ATP, but the central rudiments of linked energy metabolisms. I truly think the on line paper is basically correct. Living cells really are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic, Constraint and Spatial Closure. Via these, cells literally construct themselves. Their very boundary condition molecules constrain the release of energy in many non-equilbirum process into the few degrees of freedom that construct the very same boundary conditions. Entirely new, and due to Mael Montevil and Mateo Missio. I missed it for 15 years. Rather dumb, thrilled that they did it. The marriage of the TAP process with the theory for the first order phase transition of collective autocatalysis, TAP-RAF really works. The evolving complexity and diversity of the system increases, then the first order phase transition arises with probably almost 1.0. If YES, the emergence of life in the evolving universe really is expected. Then two major surprises. Due to Constriant Closure, the way a cell reproduces itself is not at all the way von Neumann envisioned in his self reproducing automaton. The familiar distinction between hardware and software vanishes. This must be deeply important, but its meanings are still very unclear to me. The second major surprise is that Andrea and I are confident we have demonstrated, and punished as "A Third Transition in Science?" J. Roy. Soc. Interface April 14, 2023, that we can use no mathematics based on set theory to deduce the ever - creative emergence of novelties in the evolving biosphere. If correct, as we believe, this takes the evolving biosphere entirely beyond the famous Newtonian Paradigm that is the basis of all Classical and Quantum Physics. The evolving biosphere is a non-deducible propagating construction, not an entitled deduction. The evolving biosphere is not a Computation at all, it is a non-deducible construction. If so, why do we believe with Turing and AI, that the becoming of the world, mind, everything is algorithmic? It is not. Andrea and I published, "The world is not a theorem". If correct, physicists will have to consider what this means. So do we all. Warm wishes, Stu
harscoat 3y ago
OP here, fyi Stuart Kauffman's comment is below on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39131136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39131136

451 points by harscoat 3y ago

Life else where outside the solar system is all but certain, we just need proof, just like an extra star beyond what we can see, we can’t see it but we know is there

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Seems like a common theme these days, to find some theory of math/physics to explain life/evolution/consciousness E/Acc -> Second law of thermodynamics leads to 'life' as way of increasing entropy. https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-o... Constructor Theory -> A constructor is an entity that can cause the task to occur while retaining the ability to cause it again. - and Life is constructors. Assembly Theory -> Lee Cronin. Assembly Theory defines all objects by their capacity to be assembled or broken down using minimal paths. https://iai.tv/articles/a-new-theory-of-matter-may-help-explain-life-lee-cronin-auid-2656 https://iai.tv/articles/a-new-theory-of-matter-may-help-expl... Whatever Donald Hoffman is saying lately. Which might not be about underlying layers, just how we can't know them. etc...

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
It's almost teleological. Many people have ruled out God, but still want there to be purpose or direction.
- monkaiju 3y ago
  Thats exactly what it is i think. Theyre unable to find meaning in the real world and need an equally mystical hand waivey narrative
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Not my intention to toss science out the window. All theories are just ideas or musings in the beginning. Until they are further defined, researched and proven. Things like the earth circling the sun, sounded crazy at first. It also went against god. If all independent 'thoughts' are diss-allowed because only "god" can provide the answers, then we'd still be living in trees wondering why the sun comes up. How do you think we have anything, without someone, at some point, asking 'how does this work?'.
    - monkaiju 3y ago
      Did you respond to the intended comment? Seems unrelated to mine
      - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
        The parent of yours was about God, and you seemed to agree with that one. Seemed related. Weren't you equating someone's proposed theory as hand wavy mysticism, because of a lack of meaning in their lives? But maybe not. I could me reading too much into it. Apologies.

mjburgess 3y ago

This is written like a literary academic blog article rather than an academic paper in the sciences. It's fully of literary free association and hyperbolic language, etc. At best it's a sort of mission statement for what would need to be a research programme with many many academic papers behind it. As it is, I'm not sure what the authors aim here is. It's a blog post.

Cacti 3y ago
There’s lots of crap on Arxiv.
DonHopkins 3y ago
Wait, you mean I can use Arxiv as a blog instead of Drupal or Medium? Hold me beer!
- gus_massa 3y ago
  Yep. For example, a few years ago a "cryptography researcher" posted in arXiv a new method to factorize numbers. The fist 10 page were an explanation of the rule that if the sum of the digits of N is a multiple of 3, then N is a multiple of 3. Then he explained something more interesting but the details were uninteligible. I skeemed the second part and I thought it was wrong, but after reading the firt part I didn't bother to verify all the details.
AIorNot 3y ago
[flagged]
- AIorNot 3y ago
  Also see: https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Complexity_Hordjik_Formatted.pdf https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Complex...
- master-lincoln 3y ago
  You do not seem to address the parent comment at all. Why use the reply button instead of starting a new top level comment thread?

cscheid 3y ago

Time to break out John Baez's checklist: https://archive.org/details/TheCrackpotIndex https://archive.org/details/TheCrackpotIndex

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Maybe better link, more readable : https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
tgv 3y ago
Never heard of it, but it seems to give a good digest of the format. Unfortunately, it seems aimed at non-academic crackpots. It doesn't even award points for vacuous mentioning Schrödinger or Kant.
- jyounker 3y ago
  I was really turned off by the mention of Kant at first, but reading on it's relevant to the discussion. This is a real scientist applying Kant's idea to real phenomena in a useful way. Please read the paper in detail.
  - tgv 3y ago
    I had glossed it, and the part where they make a surprise move to Kant, is ... not very convincing. The way they describe it doesn't make sense. It's not as if there's any proof that a "Whole" is life or vice versa. It's just one of their assumptions. If we take their writing as some form of evidence for it, they claim children inherit your Parts, but that's not true. They also imply that Parts cannot exist outside the Whole, which is patently false when taken literally. But in the loose sense in which they seem to use it, I could totally see a piano as a Whole: keys, snares, hammers, sound board, it doesn't make sense outside a piano. Also, notable features of life aren't included nor implied by the concept Whole. They also call Collectively Autocatalytic Sets an "established mathematical theory", but it's a mathematical property that can be true of some domain. It doesn't prove anything. There aren't any proofs involving that property in the paper either. Later they call it a "chemical reaction system," which seems to be more to the point, but there are so many of those. It's just another idea, and not an original one either. Wikipedia: "Autocatalytic sets constitute just one of several current theories of life." That Autocatalytic sets by itself isn't enough to explain life may be a point, but there's no reason to assume they've found the magical ingredient in Kant.

ta8645 3y ago

Can't help but wonder, is AI an expected phase transition in the evolution of life in the universe? Is life really just the larval stage of a higher order intelligence?

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
"expected phase transition" seems a loaded phrasing, and implies a deterministic evolution, which I really don't think we should assume.
- jyounker 3y ago
  An expected phase transition in this context is stochastic. The transition to order is expected, and there are bulk properties that are the same on each run, but the exact details differ each time.
haolez 3y ago
In the context of the universe, I wouldn't call it "intelligence" versus "artificial intelligence". I would call it "organic intelligence" vs "inorganic intelligence".
- neom 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism :)
  - junon 3y ago
    Not quite sure this is what GP meant.
- irrational 3y ago
  http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.shtml http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.sh...
- Koshkin 3y ago

asow92 3y ago

> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature. This sentiment has always made me question when people say things are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then aren't they naturally occurring? edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.

Drakim 3y ago
It makes more sense when you realize that unnatural and artificial are societal words akin to immoral or bad. Within that context they are perfectly crumulent words, it's only when we wish to have them be objective outside humanity that they don't make sense anymore.
- Koshkin 3y ago
  > societal words Indeed, all words are "societal." The meaning(s) of a word is/are always a matter of convention (or tradition).
mc32 3y ago
Ok, maybe synthetic is a better word for many instances of their use. As in synthesized with the aid human intervention.
- xixixao 3y ago
  In which case coral reefs are also synthetic :)
  - simiones 3y ago
    Most coral reefs predate human intervention by a few hundred million years.
- GoldenRacer 3y ago
  Where exactly is the line drawn for how much and what type of human intervention is required? When I cook food, human intervention is causing chemical reactions that change the composition of the food. I doubt many people consider grill marks to be unnatural or synthetic.

schnitzelstoat 3y ago

I think life is going to be quite common as it seems it just requires liquid water and an extremely common type of rock in order to form alkaline hydro-thermic vents. It appears that life developed quite quickly in this manner after the formation of the Earth. The leap from bacteria and archaea to eukaryotes, however, took billions of years. So complex life may be rare.

mavili 3y ago
Should be so common, right? Yet we're struggling to find any form of life. Not complex, just anything that lives.
- simiones 3y ago
  I don't think we have any tools that could possibly detect bacterial life anywhere where we don't have a physical presence at the moment. That is, even if Venus were teeming with simple life on every square cm, I don't think any of our instruments could pick it up unless we send a probe to collect and analyze samples. So, at the moment we have no hope of detecting this type of life outside the solar system even if it were universal.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    We've got photos from the surface of Venus: https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-... It's visibly not covered in moss, fungus, grasses, algae, slime. On Earth we talk about hot hydrothermal vents underwater: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-vents.html https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/survival-at-hydrothermal-vent... - this says "the Pompeii worm [...] is one of the most heat-resistant multicellular animals on the planet, able to withstand temperature spikes of over 80°C. 'Most animals can't cope with anything over 40°C. Very close to the hot fluid, there are typically only microorganisms. These can survive in temperatures up to around 120°C,' explains Maggie." The surface of Venus averages 462°C. Okay we won't know for sure unless we collect samples, but we do know any life would have to be heat resistant beyond anything we know of - beyond what our metal space probes could tolerate - and invisible to the naked camera even in 'teeming' quantities, and leaving no trace of waste gasses in the atmosphere which we can detect remotely. [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkMwv9EYQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvkMwv9EYQQ - Venera: The Incredible Probe that the Soviets Sent to Venus ]

zenkat 3y ago

I was fascinated by "At Home In The Universe" back in the 90s. But this seems like a rehashing of the same ideas, without new evidence or theory. Anything new here?

TravisCooper 3y ago

If you have an erroneous view of life and it's origins on earth, you'll come up with variations of this type of thinking. However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible. Entropy is increasing.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
> However, life didn't evolve through a random walk of chemical reactions turning into complex systems with the ability to replicate and gain ever increasing complexity over time. Not possible. How else could it have evolved?
deleted 3y ago
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spuz 3y ago
Increase in entropy does not imply decrease in complexity. Actually physicists believe the relationship between entropy and complexity is more of a bell shape curve. https://youtu.be/MTFY0H4EZx4 https://youtu.be/MTFY0H4EZx4
pfdietz 3y ago
Oh look, another person utterly mangling the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics. Evolution is in no way in contradiction to the 2nd law.

hamburga 3y ago

I sat in on one of Stephen Wolfram’s YouTube lectures on his new physics project, and asked him about his conception of life in the big picture of physics. His perspective was that (if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing him) there’s nothing particularly special about life from the perspective of physics. What we call life simply correlates to parts of the physical world that have the highest degree of complexity and internal structure. Life is not binary.

delichon 3y ago
Ok. What's an example of something low but non-zero on the spectrum of life? I'm having trouble thinking of one that isn't more properly "life-like".
- Balgair 3y ago
  Viruses? New understandings of mega-viruses have let us to believe that the line is really quite fuzzy. Some of these larger viruses have double stranded DNA, some have ribosome like functions, some have ERs, etc. Kinda like a cell, but missing random parts that make them truly alive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandoravirus
  - MacsHeadroom 3y ago
    Potentially crystals as well. While we don't typically consider them part of "biology" there are some good arguments for including them as a form of life.
  - beacon294 3y ago
    You can also consider a virus a loosely coupled form, which really increases the size of the virus, since it requires its platform to propagate.
- hamburga 3y ago
  All the ingredients of the primordial soup that bacteria grew from - water, methane, carbohydrates.

mavili 3y ago

There is nothing "expected" in a truly random universe. You cannot have your cake and eat it, there is either some sort of 'order' in the universe or there is none. You cannot place forms of order where it suits you but reject it when it doesn't.

deleted 3y ago
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mewpmewp2 3y ago
There are expectations even with random. E.g. if you have a truly random dice and you throw it millions of times you would expect the occurrence of each number to be similarly around 1/6. So it could be argued that given laws of universe, seeding it in any state could with very high odds come to an emergence of life, which makes it to be "expected".
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Think you are conflating just random pool balls, and particles with properties. If a few hydrogen and oxygen atoms get together and form water. That is expected, even if they are bouncing around randomly. This occurs at many different scales. There is random motion of particles of air in a room, but the overall 'pressure' can be measured and be constant.

tobbe2064 3y ago

This reminds me. There was a paper published a couple of years ago and posted here on HN that actually calculated the probability of life aminoacid-based life emerging. Based on the complexity of the chain needed to start replicating. The conclusion was that it was vanishingly small in the observable universe but only close to 0 in the full universe. I've since tried to find it without luck. Does anybody here know where I can read it or remember the article I'm talking about?

XTXinverseXTY 3y ago
"Emergence of life in an inflationary universe"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30047650
r721 3y ago
Probably not this one, but it's on related topic: >There’s plenty of time for evolution (2010) https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016207107 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1016207107
imworkingrn 3y ago
Not sure if there what the term for this is, but rather than looking at the probability of X happening we should rather look at the "inevitability" of X happening in the context of the environment. In my experience, even though nature looks chaotic there is a very strict order to things which has evolved over millions of years and is a result of looking for the "most optimal way" to achieve a goal. A good example might be mycelium optimizing routes to nearby resources. Another might be ant colonies creating tunnels that are effective to navigate. The problem is, in my opinion, that we do not know what the final goal is. Therefore we cannot begin to analyze the inevitability of something as us, or life in general, happening. The answer may be perhaps found in religion or some similar "greater than life" endeavor.
gus_massa 3y ago
"Darwinian evolution is not a sufficient theory of life (claremont.org)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20568692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20568692 I posted a comment there. They are using a very long protein instead of a short one. Nobody expect that the first functional protein is so long. Also, they are generating the protein using a "random dice" instead of assuming a short crapppy version and using "branch and prune" to find a longer and more efficient one.

dooopdoop 3y ago

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1970-01-01 3y ago

Extra-terrestrial life remains a hypothetical. There is no empirical evidence it exists beyond Earth. Until we witness some kind of artificial signal, or break open an asteroid with fossilized life, or somehow visit extra solar worlds with it, or get an unexpected visit, we're simply left arguing about the math.

MOARDONGZPLZ 3y ago
So hypothetically we observe that there is life somewhere, say beyond our ability to reach. What’s the next step beyond arguing about the math now that this is confirmed?
- Filligree 3y ago
  Then we can stop arguing about the math.
  - awb 3y ago
    Detecting life would still be a small sample size. You’d need to detect life or rule it out on a variety of planet sizes, ages and compositions at a variety of distances around a variety of star types, ages and sizes at varying locations in the galaxy before we’d have enough data to make confident predictions.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  The next step is arguing about communications. Do you trust the unforgiving universe to respond kindly? Is it a dark forest trap?
m3kw9 3y ago
Is hypothetical but the minuscule chance there isn’t a single cell outside of earth is almost infinitely minuscule. Is like saying to your friend “you have a chance to win the mega billions lottery”. It’s meaningless to them because they round down to that you have no chance
m3kw9 3y ago

lachlan_gray 3y ago

It's fascinating to me that the complexity of life always goes up. Outside extinction events, complex life generally seems to become more favourable over time. It's interesting that (to my knowledge) we don't see an ecosystem lose complexity in its entirety unless it's dying. Simple organisms make a bedrock for complex organisms, and while the complex organisms have more specific needs, they are better at exploring, gaining, branching out. So they also kind of make a nest for the simple organisms by sprawling into the void and finding habitable niches that simple organisms wouldn't reach on their own. On the time scale of technology, we began reaching out to other intelligences the second that we could, began trying to make them the second we thought we could know how. It's very reasonable to say that percolation is a defining property of life and intelligence. I also think a lot of scifi's like hyperion, neuromancer, foundation. In human writing of the future, it seems like the endgame of higher intelligence is to find or create other intelligences, and get closer to them. Then interesting things happen in the wake of that.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I think it was a Greg Bear novel, but a line from it struck me as insightful... paraphrased badly, "even evolution is evolving".
- SnazzyJeff 3y ago
  [dead]
HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
I think the trend towards complexity is more just due to more complex things being built out of less complex ones - complexity creates/supports greater complexity, so it's a natural progression. For higher level animals complexity may also be more inherently favorable since it supports a more customized environmental "fit", and helps in the predator-prey arms race.
- alphazard 3y ago
  Yeah this is it. It's very unlikely to see something which cannot be decomposed into similar parts come into existence. Something highly complex and irreducible. But simple things are likely to come into existence. So given that we see complicated things, we should assume that they are reducible, and that they came from simpler things. This creates the appearance of a "trend" as you say. But it's really that the complicated things couldn't exist before and now they can. Another effect is that it's possible to be more fit (in the Darwinian sense) when you are more complicated. The fittest system with complexity n is <= the fitness of a system with complexity >n. The rate at which things are destroyed is inversely proportional to their fitness (definitionally). So more complicated things can be better at staying around. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory

HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago

Reading the introductory paragraph to the paper, it sounds like a rehash of Kaufmann's (very good) book "At Home in the Universe", which at this point is almost 30 years old. Not sure what this paper adds, but will read it to find out. The thesis of Kaufmann's book is that the emergence of life, given supporting conditions (variety of source chemicals in environment, sources of energy, maybe water/mixing) is all but inevitable (hence life being "at home" in the universe) rather than being some rare event. The reasoning is that when these preconditions are met there will be a variety of chemical chain reactions occurring where the product of one reaction is used as the input to the next, and eventually reaction chains that include products that act as catalysts for parts of the reaction chain. These types of reaction can be considered as a primitive metabolism - consuming certain environmental chemicals and producing others useful to the metabolism. From here to proto-cells and the beginning of evolution all it takes is some sort of cell-like container which (e.g.) need be nothing more than than something like froth on the seashore, based out of whatever may be floating on the water surface. Initial "reproduction" would be based on physical agitation (e.g wave action) breaking cells and creating new ones. Different locations would have different micro-environments with different locally occurring reaction chains and "proliferation/survival of the fittest" would be the very beginning of evolution, as those reactions better able to utilize chemical sources and support their own structure/metabolism would become more widespread. Anyway, a good book and plausible thesis in general (one could easily adapt the specifics from seashore to deep sea thermal vents etc).

libeclipse 3y ago
Did you see the authors of the paper?
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
  Yes - that's what I meant. Kaufmann rehashing his old work (but presumably adding something to it too).

ltbarcly3 3y ago

As soon as I see a supposed scientific paper that was typeset in Microsoft Word, I know it's going to be trash. It's not a perfect heuristic, but it's like 99%+.

ltbarcly3 3y ago
I love that this was downvoted because it's unlikely that anyone who downvoted it knows what scientific papers are actually typeset with. HN is now a hangout for PMs and wannabe nontechnical founders who want to feel cool.
- ducttapecrown 3y ago
  This scientist is just older than LaTeX.

jyounker 3y ago

I went I read the first few paragraphs I thought, "Is someone ripping off Stuart Kaufmann? He was writing about this idea thirty years ago." Then I read the first author: Stuart Kaufmann. For those of you following along at home, Kaufmann has been developing the ideas here for decades. The paper is less a "here is a new idea" and much more "here is a concise summary of 50 years of work". The words and thoughts seem opaque, but this is case where they actually have concrete and specific meanings. It's worth noting too, that towards the end of the article he outlines experiments that could be used to falsify the theory. If you want a really hard-core dive into the ideas, then check out his 1993 book, "On The Origins of Order" (ISBN 978-0-19-507951-7). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order-9780195079517 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-order...

jamesblonde 3y ago
Recommend reading along with order out of chaos and anything from Prigogine in the 80s (not his last book).
enneff 3y ago
It doesn’t seem opaque to me and I’m no scientist. Pretty clearly expressed imo.
- willlma 3y ago
  So you didn't look any of these terms up? Would love an explanation of * Kantian Wholes * Catalytic Closure * Constraint Closure * Spatial Closure * a first-order phase transition to molecular reproduction * phylogeny of metabolisms * template replication Thanks
  - lejoko 3y ago
    Read the article ! As it says : "We explain these concepts below."
  - enneff 3y ago
    They were explained clearly in the article I found. Although those last three are self-explanatory if you know what the individual words mean, they’re in the dictionary.

madmountaingoat 3y ago

To my laymen brain this seems very similar to Lee Cronin's Assembly theory. Curious to understand more about the difference.

zhynn 3y ago
My snarky take is: Assembly theory is testable, this one isn't.
jcims 3y ago
First thing that came to my lay mind as well. Really interesting episode with him talking about it on Lex Fridman's podcast. Feels like there's something there.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
The two concepts don't preclude each other, but they're not the same concept. Assembly theory is a theory that tells us that when we observe the complexity of something that is not unoque, we can determine probabilistically from it's complexity the likelihood of it being created by some type of active agent, mind or something. Lee continues with this to speculate a lot more (and I think he's on to something) about time being fundamental and what a mind is. It's sort of a computational complexity theory applied to intelligence. This "phase transition" hypothesis is basically saying that life is emerging in the universe in a stage akin to recombination[0] as a more stable state, and that the universe without life is a metastable state[1]. This would mean that life will ultimately absorb all matter in the universe, as if it were a phase transition the cosmological principle says that the universe is uniform[2]. It sounds like a pretty idea but I'm not really convinced, phase transitions propagate at the speed of light. An exponential curve where the transition ramps up is am interesting idea to ponder. There are existing fantastic explanations for life that exist that are very interesting that don't require the universe to undergo a phase transition. Simple entropy and the red shifting of energy explain it's existence just fine. Nevertheless, all this research and these attempts to understand what life, consciousness, minds, creative agents and all that are in the context of our universe are really fun and I think all this exploration will bear some delicious fruit. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

jayavanth 3y ago

Can someone eli5?

huqedato 3y ago

tldr: the article proposes a new way to understand the origin of life. It combines two scientific ideas to explain how life emerges naturally as a part of the universe's evolution. Key concepts include how chemicals interact and support each other to create life, and the idea that life continuously explores new possibilities. The article challenges the traditional view of separating the physical and informational parts of living cells, suggesting a more integrated approach to studying life's beginnings and development.

johngossman 3y ago

There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet, seems good). Honestly, the details change, and the emphasis of each author, but they are all speculative and hand-wavey. Pre-paradigmatic. My favorite quote is from "Life on the Edge" by McFadden and Al-Khalili: "Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena"

jmcqk6 3y ago
It's a complex topic. I think it really got kicked off with "What is Life?" and we've been able to build more details on it since then. There are many parts of the story that we know in incredible details. Chaos theory, information theory, non-equillibrium thermodynamics, complexity and emergence, auto-catalytic chemistry are all just parts of it, and each one are massive fields of study on their own. I'm not sure there will ever be a synthesis of all these things that creates a paradigm of some sort. There's simply too much.
- ixaxaar 3y ago
  I think the complexity researchers over the years have created a wide range of tooling for analysing complex systems across a large number of domains. Consider complexity economics, computational social sciences, network sciences and cascading networks, evolutionary theories, parts of systems biology, connectomics and computational neuroscience etc. The Santa Fe institute has been at the forefront and has an amazing collections of publications in their own press. David krakaeur's book "Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute" is like a 20 year survey paper and an amazing read.
  - photonthug 3y ago

lutusp 3y ago

"Is the emergence of life an expected phase transition in the evolving universe? (arxiv.org)" Easily answered: * We don't know how consciousness comes into being, indeed we can't rigorously define it or unambiguously identify its presence or absence. * We believe we have it, but we aren't sure whether other animals and/or objects possess it. * Therefore, based on Occam's razor, we may provisionally assume that all matter possesses some degree of consciousness -- this is the simplest assumption. * The alternative would be to argue for a consciousness exceptionalism in "life" forms for which there is no evidence and many counterarguments. * Therefore it follows that ... wait for it ... life is not a special state of matter or energy. * Therefore the emergence of life doesn't represent a phase transition that confronts physical laws or requires an explanation.

gfodor 3y ago
That's not an answer, that's an argument. Occam's Razor isn't like the second law of thermodynamics. It's a heuristic.
- willmadden 3y ago
  The paper defines life as a chemical reaction, which is also a heuristic. We do not know if aspects of "life" exist outside of our present understanding of physics. It's great to claw away at the edges, but I don't think anyone can answer the question "what is life?" at this point.
- onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  Yes. You can't prove anything by proving it is the simplest explanation. The only way to prove things is to prove that it is the only possible explanation. Occam's Razor is just a useful mind tool that helps us navigate the world based on the observation that oftentimes the simplest explanation tends to be what is actually happening. BTW lots of other logical mistakes.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    It's also a useful tool in science. For example, we do not know and cannot prove the one-way speed of light, only a round trip speed of light. That light travels at the same speed in all directions is just a useful application of Occam's Razor; it is effectively unknowable and no experiments have yet been devised that can falsify the alternatives. Having a set one-way speed of light is a convention

waynenator 3y ago

always liked the "Anthropic Cosmological Principle" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

BurningFrog 3y ago

For something to be expected, someone must be expecting it. And to be able to expect things, you must be alive. This proves something, but I'm not sure what...

yellow_lead 3y ago
"I think therefore I am"

javajosh 3y ago

I personally believe that the origin of life started with something we would not recognize as such today. I imagine that it started with some long molecules in water and they have the ability to grow longer and longer. Maybe they looped around and the dynamics of the system meant that if they oriented toward the sun better they would be more numerous. Maybe if their composition was a little bit different they would acquire material from the surrounding bath more efficiently. This creates a gradient of success where the topmost molecules will do better than the bottom most molecules. Similar perturbations would allow them to acquire more material more efficiently in a pantomime of eating. Reproduction would be something as simple as breaking in half. This is of course a just so story, but it's one that I find pretty compelling. But I would like it if people thought more about what these early systems looked like rather than be so hand wavy. I think it's unlikely that any of these very early forms of life survive as they were consumed by subsequent generations. It also seems unlikely that they would form very often spontaneously such that we might find examples in nature. If such a form develops only once in a million years in a planet-wide irradiated bath, then we would have a huge challenge. Even simulating such a system to find what that structure might be. So instead I think we should use our imaginations and imagine what the simplest possible system could possibly work in that circumstance to bootstrap life.

ruffrey 3y ago

Related, lately I have been enthralled with the work of Michael Levin at Tufts. He studies things like goal directed behavior of cells and systems of cells. Here is an intro to his work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3lsYlod5OU

eye-robot 3y ago

Interesting (side note) as I read all the commentary here: As people (obviously) are reacting to the particular "group psychology", or personality or culture here within HN, many commentators are heavily apologizing for not having specific links or attributions available. And I understand why now: Too many neurotic or OCD (or selfishly angry) individuals who will downvote in a heartbeat if the comment isn't to their supreme liking. So, to prove that point, this comment will (most likely) get downvoted into oblivion. I like free commentary sections that don't show off "commentary powers". I once asked a simple innocent question and the downvotes simply drove me to stop trusting anyone here... really sad, since I am an intelligent person with feelings and with curiosity and VALID opinions. Sorry that this rubs the weird people the wrong way. Just sayin'

maksimur 3y ago
I've noticed the same thing but I don't remember it being so prevalent up until a few years ago. This is sad and as you rightly suggest it stifles curious conversations. I had to self-censor myself a few times already.

bluenose69 3y ago

I stopped reading the article at "Life is a double miracle." As is so often the case, discussion here on HN is more compelling than the article.

tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago

There is a lot of work to be done inorder to fuse the gaps between physics and biology.

api 3y ago

I've had a speculation about the Fermi paradox for years. I call it the uniform cooling hypothesis. Not sure if it's original or not. The idea builds on the present cosmological model that considers the universe to all be of the same age. If the emergence of complex life in the universe is a threshold or phase transition effect, it might not happen until the universe reaches a certain age in which all conditions are satisfied. At this point you'd have the "simultaneous" (at geologic time scales) emergence of complex life all over the place. If this were the case, what if for some reason (such as multiple overlapping factors all having to be satisfied) the standard deviation in the time dimension is actually small? In other words what if life emerges or hits certain evolutionary milestones at about the same time +/- a fairly narrow window like one million years. If that were the case then the universe would be full of things more or less about as advanced as we are, but very few that are vastly more advanced. The probability of one of those few very advanced outliers existing in, say, this galaxy might be relatively small. Intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel (which is already brutally hard) and would take millions of years even near the speed of light, so even something like a Kardashev type II or transitional type III civilization wouldn't be likely to cross between galaxies. Something like that could be out there but insanely distant and completely undetectable. We wouldn't see alien interstellar probes, starships, or techno-signatures from anything large scale enough to be detectable because for the most part these things don't exist yet. Would also imply that once we build a starship, that's about the time we should expect to encounter starships. It would be a cosmic-scale version of the principle (and apparent historical pattern) that steam engines appear when it is "steam engine time." Maybe it's just not starship time yet. If the standard deviation is very narrow, you'd have this weird interstellar trick or treat night event where the probes and starships start arriving at about the same time everywhere in the entire universe. At this point maybe everyone exchanges knowledge and technology and you have an insane explosion in complexity, sort of a cosmic Cambrian explosion, and then you get Kardashev type II and III civilizations and onward. Zoom way, way out and it looks like a sudden phase transition of the entire universe from being dominated by non-living physical processes to being dominated by living processes.

hfgjbcgjbvg 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bentona 3y ago

If you'd like yet another somewhat similar inquiry into the information-theory-based definition of life, I'll mention Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

ddgflorida 3y ago

No.

tulio_ribeiro 3y ago

life is not just a rare happenstance, but a predictable outcome of the universe's own chemical dance

chrsw 3y ago
Why do you think it's not rare? Something can be predictable and rare.

jononomo 3y ago

Life is a profound mystery -- there is absolutely no explanation for it under a materialistic/naturalistic world view. The question of the origin of life is the most fundamental and interesting question because without life no other question can even arise.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” “Plastic… asshole.” - George Carlin

mseepgood 3y ago

What's the universe's long game? Does it compete with other universes, and why does it need life to do so?

dmvjs 3y ago

im surprised that assuming life doesnt happen everywhere is the default.

martin82 3y ago

THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Stukauffman11 3y ago

Hi to All, and warm thanks Denis. More, thank you for the attention to this Stu - Andrea paper now online on OSF and arXiv. We will submit it soon. The origin of life field is many decades old, wonderful, and wonderfully fragmented. The two main approaches are: i. Template replication. ii. Metabolism first. I am a guilty party with respect to "metabolism first". In 1971 I realized that in a sufficiently diverse and complex chemical reaction system, self reproducing collectively autocatalytic sets would arise as a first order phase transition. Such sets have now been engineered using DNA, RNA, and peptides. A stunning set of recent results led by Joana Xavier has now demonstrated small molecule collectively autocatalytic sets, with NO DNA, RNA, or peptide polymers, in all 6700 prokaryotes. I am a co-author. Joana did all the work, entirely. It is not yet certain that these sets actually reproduce in vitro - a critical set tests to be done. If yes, I think this almost rules out a template first view. Such a template system would have to evolve RNA enzymes to catalyze some "connected metabolism" to create the building blocks for the template replicating systems. But there is no reason at all why such a connected metabolism on its own, without RNA polymer enzymes, would be collectively autocatalytic. Joana's sets create not only amino acids and ATP, but the central rudiments of linked energy metabolisms. I truly think the on line paper is basically correct. Living cells really are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic, Constraint and Spatial Closure. Via these, cells literally construct themselves. Their very boundary condition molecules constrain the release of energy in many non-equilbirum process into the few degrees of freedom that construct the very same boundary conditions. Entirely new, and due to Mael Montevil and Mateo Missio. I missed it for 15 years. Rather dumb, thrilled that they did it. The marriage of the TAP process with the theory for the first order phase transition of collective autocatalysis, TAP-RAF really works. The evolving complexity and diversity of the system increases, then the first order phase transition arises with probably almost 1.0. If YES, the emergence of life in the evolving universe really is expected. Then two major surprises. Due to Constriant Closure, the way a cell reproduces itself is not at all the way von Neumann envisioned in his self reproducing automaton. The familiar distinction between hardware and software vanishes. This must be deeply important, but its meanings are still very unclear to me. The second major surprise is that Andrea and I are confident we have demonstrated, and punished as "A Third Transition in Science?" J. Roy. Soc. Interface April 14, 2023, that we can use no mathematics based on set theory to deduce the ever - creative emergence of novelties in the evolving biosphere. If correct, as we believe, this takes the evolving biosphere entirely beyond the famous Newtonian Paradigm that is the basis of all Classical and Quantum Physics. The evolving biosphere is a non-deducible propagating construction, not an entitled deduction. The evolving biosphere is not a Computation at all, it is a non-deducible construction. If so, why do we believe with Turing and AI, that the becoming of the world, mind, everything is algorithmic? It is not. Andrea and I published, "The world is not a theorem". If correct, physicists will have to consider what this means. So do we all. Warm wishes, Stu

harscoat 3y ago

OP here, fyi Stuart Kauffman's comment is below on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39131136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39131136