Related papers: Foundations for reconstructing early microbial lif…
We analyse the unreduced, nonperturbative dynamics of an arbitrary many-body interaction process with the help of the generalised effective potential method and reveal the well-specified universal origin of change (emergence), time and…
Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even…
An origin of Earth life on Mars would resolve significant inconsistencies between the inferred history of life and Earth's geologic history. Life as we know it utilizes amino acids, nucleic acids, and lipids for the metabolic,…
Rapid anthropogenic environmental changes, including those due to habitat contamination, degradation, and climate change, have far-reaching effects on biological systems that may outpace animals' adaptive responses (Radchuk et al., 2019).…
Microbial communities are ubiquitous in nature and come in a multitude of forms, ranging from communities dominated by a handful of species to communities containing a wide variety of metabolically distinct organisms. This huge range in…
The human microbiome is the ensemble of genes in the microbes that live inside and on the surface of humans. Because microbial sequencing information is now much easier to come by than phenotypic information, there has been an explosion of…
All living cells interact dynamically with a constantly changing world. Eukaryotes in particular, evolved radically new ways to sense and react to their environment. These advances enabled new and more complex forms of cellular behavior in…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
Earth is the only planet known to harbor life and, as a result, the search for habitable and inhabited planets beyond the Solar System commonly focuses on analogs to our planet. However, Earth's atmosphere and surface environment have…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…
The search for what differentiates inanimate matter from living things began in antiquity as a search for a "fundamental life force" embedded deep within living things - a special material unit owned only by life - later transforming to…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
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.…
Biological activities are often seen entrained onto the day-night and other celestial mechanical cycles (e.g., seasonal and lunar), but studies on the origin of life have largely not accounted for such periodic external environmental…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
We review some basic issues of the life-prescribed development of the Earth's system and the Earth's atmosphere and discourse the unity of Earth's type of life in physical and transcendental divisions. In physical division, we exemplify and…
(English) In this lecture I discuss recent progress in the understanding of the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks that resemble our Solar system during the first ten million years. At the verge of planet formation, strong…
Some microbes appear to be able to metabolize in glacial ice or permafrost. The rate depends on temperature, nutrient level, and bioelement availability, among other factors. I have developed a plausible argument that they do this while…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
Our view of the microbial world and its impact on human health is changing radically with the ability to sequence uncultured or unculturable microbes sampled directly from their habitats, ability made possible by fast and cheap next…