Epilogue

The study of the origin of life is no longer a field in its infancy. The scientific foundation
we have to build from today is enormously richer than it was fifty years ago, in facts and
also in concepts. The difficulties of origins research are becoming those of a maturing field
with a diverse technical knowledge base: a tendency toward fragmentation and the need of
more effective ways for researchers to work together as a community.
In attempting to cover this technical material, which provides the needed factual basis
for generalizations and constitutes the fascinating detail about life and its planetary con-
text, it is easy to lose sight of the profound changes in point of view that have become
possible even within the past 20–30 years. We are struck by how many key points in this
argument we did not understand when we were introduced to the field, but which are now
fundamental to our view of the origin and nature of life.

● The universality, the historical depth, and the striking economy and conservatism of core
metabolism discovered within microbiology; within that, the overarching organizing
roles of the TCA cycle and one-carbon reduction.
● The greater continuity that can now be seen between chemical reactions carried out on
mineral substrates, those catalyzed by small molecules, and those catalyzed by enzymes.
● The complexity of the concept of individuality and its multifarious realizations, and the
complementary importance of ecosystems, culminating in the biosphere as a whole.
● The degree to which a picture can be formed of the interacting dynamics of planetary
subsystems during planet formation and early evolution, and within these the role of the
aggregate biosphere as a geosphere and its feedback on the other geospheres.
● A better formulation of the nature of thermodynamic limits, integrating in a seamless
way the dynamical and inferential interpretations, equilibrium and disequilibrium, and
stabilization and error correction.
● An appreciation of the coherence of the concepts of phase and phase transition, the
way they underpin and enable reductionist science by dividing continuous scales with
hierarchies of ceilings and floors, and the enormous scope of their application, beginning
with a comprehensive theory of matter, and we argue, continuing that theory eventually
to a theory of life.

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● Where the empirical and mathematical tributaries merge, they give us a way to state what
the universality of core metabolism signifies and the kind of concept it reflects: that its
fluxes are the order parameter of a non-equilibrium phase which serves as a foundation
and reference for biological function and innovation at all levels.
The empirical and the mathematical windows on life are equally fundamental in our
point of view. Too much in the past, mathematical claims about system properties were
viewed as disconnected from practical problems in chemistry. Nowhere has the difference
in points of view been more sharply focused than in the polarizing effect that discussions
of emergent order have had. That situation, too, may be primed to change, as the need for
robustness and selectivity in systems chemistry is driving a search for principles beyond
energetic stability analysis and a focus on single pathways.
The view that life must have emerged through a sequence of stages, that the intermediate
stages must have been incrementally stable, and that the stability is essentially a process-
stability of self-regeneration, is being expressed more widely and more explicitly among
origins researchers from many backgrounds [623]. Our effort in Chapter 7 and Chapter 8
has been to show that the conceptual foundations (and a considerable body of technique)
for such a theory exist and that these grow continuously out of the thermodynamics that
accounts for our hierarchy of matter. The order induced by phase transitions is the epitome
of emergent order, and although subtle (it did take nearly a century to understand fully!) it
is not malicious.
We hope our introduction to these topics will begin to overturn the perception of life
as a paradox of thermodynamics. The biosphere should be the system that will lead us to
understand a new domain within thermodynamics – structurally richer than the equilib-
rium domain and so technically more complex – but conceptually a continuation and not a
departure.
A point of view can be important in science. It transforms knowledge into comprehen-
sion and directs our exploration. But a point of view is not a substitute for a knowledge
of facts, and in this the origin of life is still a very young science. Already, though, the
need to grapple with the complex constraints that are known in many disciplines has
improved the perspicacity of the questions researchers are asking, and has moved some
of the disagreements from the early decades toward a more productive dialogue.
Although researchers remain divided in their priorities, and in their beliefs about which
avenues hold out the most promise, it is now possible to lay out a slate of key problems
that most will agree are fundamental and define the current frontier of efforts to understand
biogenesis. We need to identify sources of order in geochemistry beyond those that are cur-
rently recognized. There is still debate over how much memory or selectivity geochemistry
must have provided to an emerging biosphere, but the problem of sufficiency and partition-
ing of selection can be clearly framed. There must be a systems chemistry of RNA, as well
as a later population dynamics of RNA (and probably not only of RNA). Microbiology has
discovered much about the detailed interconnectedness of geochemistry and metabolism,
but the gap from geochemistry to the first integrated cell is still large in many dimensions

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 610 Epilogue

of structure and function. Every approach to the origin of life will draw, at some stage, on
what can be learned about these questions.
At the end, we think our main contribution will have been to offer a reconceptualization
of the nature of the living state that has a deeper and wider foundation in current science.
Whether the particular sequence of stages in biogenesis that we have proposed in Chapter 6
is roughly correct or turns out to be seriously in error, the scientific contexts laid out in the
other chapters should be cornerstones of the eventual correct understanding.

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