Related papers: Life Before Earth
It is argued that all notions associated with the origin of life should be related with the participatory anthropic principle of Wheeler and must be extended into the realm of the multiverse. Also discussed is the notion that life can only…
We review the thermal history of the Universe. We obtain a new estimate for the thermal history of the Earth over the past four billion years using a biological thermometer based on (1) a rough estimate of the absolute time calibration of…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
There is an intrinsic relationship between the molecular evolution in primordial period and the properties of genomes and proteomes of contemporary species. The genomic data may help us understand the driving force of evolution of life at…
Chirality or the property that distinguishes lefthandedness from righthandedness is an important aspect of the universe, starting from neutrinos, which are lefthanded. Fifteen years ago the author had proposed that life on the earth was…
The problem of evolutionary complexification of life is considered one of the fundamental aspects in contemporary evolutionary theory. Parasitism is ubiquitous, inevitable, and arises as soon as the first replicators appear, even during the…
We apply the theory of learning to physically renormalizable systems in an attempt to develop a theory of biological evolution, including the origin of life, as multilevel learning. We formulate seven fundamental principles of evolution…
In biology, the evolution of increasingly cooperative groups has shaped the history of life. Genes collaborate in the control of cells; cells efficiently divide tasks to produce cohesive multicellular individuals; individual members of…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Drake formula, it appears interesting to briefly review the history of Astrobiology from the origins up to the epoch of the Drake formula. After recalling the main steps of this history during…
The number of people able to end Earth's technical civilization has heretofore been small. Emerging dual-use technologies, such as biotechnology, may give similar power to thousands or millions of individuals. To quantitatively investigate…
Ancient Venus and Earth may have been similar in crucial ways for the development of life, such as liquid water oceans, land-ocean interfaces, favorable chemical ingredients and energy pathways. If life ever developed on, or was transported…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
The origin of cellular life can be described in terms of the transition from inorganic matter: solids, liquids and gases, to the emergence of cooperative assemblies of organic matter, DNA and proteins,capable of replication and metabolism.…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism's DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical…
Prior to the origin of simple cellular life, the building blocks of RNA (nucleotides) had to form and polymerize in favourable environments on the early Earth. At this time, meteorites and interplanetary dust particles delivered organics…
The new field of complex systems supports the view that a number of systems arising from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, engineering, and economics may have certain quantitative features that are intriguingly similar. The earth…
The idea that all life on earth traces back to a common beginning dates back at least to Charles Darwin's {\em Origin of Species}. Ever since, biologists have tried to piece together parts of this `tree of life' based on what we can observe…