This ‘biogeochemical’ vision arguably took root with the works of Vernadsky, and has reached its greatest heights with NASA's Astrobiology programme. Ĭoncurrent with the development of ideas largely driven by progress in biochemistry and molecular biology, there is an increasing awareness of the complexity and inseverability between biology and its environment.

This state of affairs has remained remarkably constant over time, as has the general trend that new models tend to sprout from discoveries in other, more fundamental fields of scientific inquiry. These uncertainties are unlikely to be resolved soon, as the historical data that link the gap between the Last Universal Common Ancestor and the as-yet-undetermined chemical phenomena modern scientists might call life or protolife are not directly available for recovery or study. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Reconceptualizing the origins of life’.Ī compelling physico-chemical explanation for the origin of life remains elusive, with modern workers split between numerous, often mutually exclusive models that hinge on uncertainties between the rates of flux of energy, organic compound productivity and chemical compound interactivity. By extension, the maximum capacity for organic chemical complexification across molecular and macromolecular scales subsumes, rather than emerges from, the underlying complexity of energy transduction processes that drive their production and modification. We posit that different forms of energy input can exhibit different degrees of dissipation complexity within an identical chemical medium. There is evidence for an emergent level of complexity that is overlooked in most conceptualizations of abiogenesis that arises from populations of compounds formed from atomic energy input. Within the framework of a new guiding principle for prebiotic chemistry called subsumed complexity, organic compounds are viewed as by-products of energy transduction phenomena at different scales (subatomic, atomic, molecular and polymeric) that retain energy in the form of bonds that inhibit energy from reaching the ground state. Origins research has traditionally proceeded under an array of implicit or explicit guiding principles in lieu of a universal formalism for abiogenesis.

The origins of life bring into stark relief the inadequacy of our current synthesis of thermodynamic, chemical, physical and information theory to predict the conditions under which complex, living states of organic matter can arise.

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