Related papers: Life Before Earth
It is not currently possible to create a living organism ab initio due to the overwhelming complexity of biological systems. In fact, the origin of life mechanism, this being how biological organisms form from non-living matter, is unknown.…
Genomic data are rapidly resolving the tree of living species calibrated to time, the timetree of life, which will provide a framework for research in diverse fields of science. Previous analyses of taxonomically restricted timetrees have…
Life is a complex biological phenomenon represented by numerous chemical, physical and biological processes performed by a biothermodynamic system/cell/organism. Both living organisms and inanimate objects are subject to aging, a biological…
It is often presumed, that life evolves relatively fast on planets with clement conditions, at least in its basic forms, and that extended periods of habitability are subsequently needed for the evolution of higher life forms. Many planets…
Several exoplanets have been discovered to date, and the next step is the search for extraterrestrial life. However, it is difficult to estimate the number of life-bearing exoplanets because our only template is based on life on Earth. In…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. In this review I describe the standard theoretical…
The oldest forms of living organisms on Earth are about 3.5 billion years old, and they are found in hydrothermal deposits, and it is often hypothesized that life originated there. But the hydrothermal systems with a fairly strong flow of…
The study of the origin of life on Earth has been broadened due to panspermia models that suggest that early life may have been transferred between planets. Mars likely once had conditions that could support life, and it is interesting…
The origin of life occupies a very important place in the study of the evolution. Its liminal location between life and non-life poses special challenges to researchers who study this subject. Current approaches in studying the origin and…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We consider the habitability of the Universe throughout cosmic history, and conservatively restrict our attention to the context of "life as we know it" and…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
Our Sun and planetary system were born about 4.5 billion years ago. How did this happen and what is our heritage from these early times? This review tries to address these questions from an astrochemical point of view. On the one hand, we…
The intricacy and diversity inherent in living organisms present a formidable obstacle to the establishment of a universally accepted definition. Life manifests in a multitude of forms, exhibiting various attributes such as growth,…
The ongoing searches for exoplanetary systems have revealed a wealth of planets with diverse physical properties. Planets even smaller than the Earth have already been detected, and the efforts of future missions are placed on the…
A central and long-standing issue in evolutionary theory is the origin of the biological variation upon which natural selection acts1. Some hypotheses suggest that evolutionary change represents an adaptation to the surrounding environment…
Understanding the origin(s) of life (OoL) is a fundamental challenge for science in the 21st century. Research on OoL spans many disciplines, including chemistry, physics, biology, planetary sciences, computer science, mathematics and…
The thermodynamic arrow-of-time problem is thought to be resolved by the observation that our universe initially was---and still is---far from equilibrium. The psychological arrow-of-time problem is often attributed the same resolution, but…
With the completion of human genome mapping, the focus of scientists seeking to explain the biological complexity of living systems is shifting from analyzing the individual components (such as a particular gene or biochemical reaction) to…
This paper presents the proportional evolutionary time hypothesis, which posits that the mean time required for the evolution of complex life is a function of stellar mass. The "biological available window" is defined as the region of a…