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Nick Thompson

Origins of Life

Dear Friammers,

Today’s meeting of the Mother Church got back to our old discussions of complexity, gradients, and the origin of life. In that connection I urged everybody to read Nick Lane’s, THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life. The fundamental theory is that life was scaffolded by the microstructure and energy flows taking place in deep ocean vents called “white smokers”. I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think of it.

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Jochen Fromm-5

Re: Origins of Life

The ocean vent theory is not new, or is it?

http://www.space.com/32379-life-building-blocks-deep-sea-vents.html

IMHO it becomes more interesting when RNA and DNA is involved, that is to say when a code is involved. It is the same with ancient cultures, the stone age is barely interesting, it gets much more fascinating when a code in form of a writing system is involved, for example among the ancient Egyptians, Maya, Aztecs, Sumerians, etc.

-Jochen

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Russ Abbott <[hidden email]>

Date: 4/23/16 07:11 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Origins of Life

Nick Lane is terrific. I've read a number of his books -- but not The Vital Question yet. In this talk and this talk he discusses some of the issues he writes about in the book.

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 9:11 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Friammers,

Today’s meeting of the Mother Church got back to our old discussions of complexity, gradients, and the origin of life. In that connection I urged everybody to read Nick Lane’s, THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life. The fundamental theory is that life was scaffolded by the microstructure and energy flows taking place in deep ocean vents called “white smokers”. I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think of it.

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

David Eric Smith

Re: Origins of Life

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

<base href="x-msg://116/">Hi Nick, Russ, and all,

Far too much here to be able to answer, but I feel this is one I should pick up a little. I am relieved that your question is quite specific:

I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think of it.

I haven't read this book. Maybe someday will have time. I should end the email there.

But I do know Nick Lane somewhat, and I know this story rather well from the technical literature. So, a too-brief answer.

1. Good to be aware that this is Nick's adoption and somewhat-personally-developed interpretation of ideas Mike Russell has been arguing for something like 30 or 40 years. Nick gives credit, and is a fair colleague as well as a good expositor, so no worry there. The particular angle he emphasizes is part of his larger interest in energetic constraints on life. His interest in their relation to the formation of Eukaryotic cells is developed in his earlier book Power, Sex, Suicide. The flavor it gives of the author's interests may help put the Vital Question treatment into a richer context for readers.

2. These arguments have strengths and weaknesses per my tastes, largely divided according to the styles of the argument put forth.

The strengths tend to be on rather general points, many of which I agree with. The reason for focus on the deep ocean is that much of the chemical disequilibrium between an Earth-interior which has a lot of iron in a relatively reducing ( = electron-donating) state, and oceans and atmosphere that are driven to be more oxidizing ( = electron-accepting) due to asymmetric escape of hydrogen from the upper atmosphere, is concentrated on a tectonic Earth at spreading centers. Because of the way crust forms, most of these are under the oceans on a wet planet like ours.

A thing to appreciate about Mike's arguments -- and the reason for the obsessive focus on white smokers -- is that it has so far been difficult to do chemistry that looks like biochemistry purely from the electron-donating potential of the small molecules that are concentrated in the chemical focusing regions at or near mid-ocean spreading centers. Therefore Mike wants to also harness the pH difference between the primary alteration fluids from the subsurface rock-water interaction zone, and the surrounding oceans. He wants to add the energy from the pH difference to the energy from the electron-transfer chemistry, in the hope that this will make it easier to produce something that looks biochemical.

There is a more general way to say this: In modern cells, the organic chemistry that builds biomass, and certain pH differences that carry biological energy, are interdependent and closely coupled in their architecture. Mike started arguing (I think in the 1970s) that this coupling of pH energetics and biochemistry should be viewed as continuous all the way back to pre-cellular geochemistry. That is, don't try to explain the biochemistry and the bioenergetics separately and figure out how to link them later; rather, view them as having been interdependent all along.

That general line of argument was picked up first (in a big way) by Bill Martin at Dusseldorf, and then later added Nick Lane, and then several others in more limited roles. Sometimes these authors have been collaborators and said they agree; other times they have had variant interpretations and been in various conflicts. Sometimes figuring out what they are arguing about can be difficult and even mystifying.

3. The place where all these arguments get poor in my view is that they go from these general insights (which may be right or wrong, but are reasonable to pursue), to trying to unpack them into very detailed stories about the trajectory of life from the very beginning to very advanced. They harp on white smokers (a quite particular kind of rock-water alteration environment) because they can tell a visual story about how the geometry and pH gradients in the rock/water system could be imagined to continue directly to the geometry of cells. This is one of those things that -- on a wild hair -- could turn out to have some relation to what really happened, but is built on a kind of visual metaphorizing like "Oh look! That cloud looks like a puppy's face!", which is neither a very conceptual nor a very robust style of argument. There is a vast number of problems that have to be solved to understand the various emergences of complexity between early chemistry and cells, and for most of these it is difficult to argue that anyone in the world has contributed really compelling ideas. The imagination that Russell, Martin, Lane, or whomever, will plot a detailed story line through this 10,000-dimensional space of ignorances, and get anywhere very close to correct, seems to me fanciful.

As a matter of personal preference for style, I would prefer if they separated their general arguments about energy flow -- which I think are sensible and insightful and the strong part of their work -- from the problems of growing complexity, where they have little more to offer than any scientific layman. That would make it easier to judge the strengths and weaknesses, and would save time. They tend to mix the strong and the weak parts, and have equal vigor and enthusiasm for both, which I think muddies the waters.

The thing that such scenarioistic reasoning hides is that there is a wide variety of rock/water alteration environments even on the present Earth, and the ones on the very earliest Earth were likely to be somewhat different. Where it is best to look in this large parameter space is actually very wide open. These authors (I think) are aware of this complexity, but it doesn't seem to affect their style of argument much.

It is a challenge, admittedly, to know what to do that is better than scenarioizing in this domain. This is where I think "theory" should really have something to add. What one would like is to learn about particular mechanisms, to figure out conceptually why they matter, and then to try to turn that into a more systematic way to scan a large parameter space, and to reason from experiments about where to search for locations or mechanisms that may be different from the ones where you discovered a phenomenon, but which fit more correctly into the bigger picture. This is a lesson that, it seems, both physics and biology should have taught us many times over. If you look at the function a thing has in the present, and ask what function its predecessor had that enabled its current form, often there will be a deep conceptual continuity, but only rarely is that reflected in a superficial visual continuity parsed according to our own habits of dividing the world into objects. I like the way some physicists like Elbert Branscomb (also part of the Russell collaborative circle) try to take problems apart in this way, and there are some good chemists in Origin of Life who seem to operate at this level (sometimes Nick Hud of Georgia Tech, George Cody at Carnegie Institution, a good guy names Joseph Moran at Uni Strasbourg who mostly works in synthetic chemistry, and probably others I could think of). The slow and tentative style of that reasoning doesn't translate well into a satisfying public narrative, so it is harder to see the things many of these guys have done.

In the end, probably all the approaches will be helpful, so I should close by saying I am glad all of it is there. My small quibbles about style shouldn't detract from that.

Hope this is helpful or useful,

Eric

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Stephen Guerin-5

Re: Origins of Life

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nick,

I downloaded Nick Lane's Vital Question book a couple months back. From a quick skim I got the sense it was a nice review of much of the work going on around non-equilibrium thermodynamic origin of life explanations by the "Seventh Day Ventists" (eg second law arguments for the emegence of life via gradient dissipation around deep sea vents). In addition to reviewing this work, Dr. Lane has original contributions as well. I would recommend it for anyone as a great introduction.

In fact our own Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz (who just passed last month) work is mentioned in Vital Question. You might check out Eric's recent talk at the Aspen Institute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cwvj0XBKlE) which addresses a couple questions that came up at FRIAM yesterday.

In particular, I think the talk much more elegantly describes the shift to defining life as an ecological pattern from the prior emphasis on the individual organism.

on "are viruses alive" Eric challenges the meaning of a "living thing"

https://youtu.be/0cwvj0XBKlE?t=48m21s

Also Eric's SFI public lecture from a few years back is very relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw

_______________________________________________________________________
[hidden email]

CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: (505)995-0206 mobile: (505)577-5828

twitter: @simtable

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 10:09 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Friammers,

Today’s meeting of the Mother Church got back to our old discussions of complexity, gradients, and the origin of life. In that connection I urged everybody to read Nick Lane’s, THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life. The fundamental theory is that life was scaffolded by the microstructure and energy flows taking place in deep ocean vents called “white smokers”. I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think of it.

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Carl Tollander

Re: Origins of Life

In reply to this post by Jochen Fromm-5

http://phys.org/news/2016-04-scientists-rna-abundant-space.html
Folks conflate the comet-origins direction with panspermia, but they are not quite the same thing.

On 4/24/16 1:47 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:

The ocean vent theory is not new, or is it?

http://www.space.com/32379-life-building-blocks-deep-sea-vents.html

IMHO it becomes more interesting when RNA and DNA is involved, that is to say when a code is involved. It is the same with ancient cultures, the stone age is barely interesting, it gets much more fascinating when a code in form of a writing system is involved, for example among the ancient Egyptians, Maya, Aztecs, Sumerians, etc.

-Jochen

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

-------- Original message --------

From: Russ Abbott [hidden email]

Date: 4/23/16 07:11 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Origins of Life

Nick Lane is terrific. I've read a number of his books -- but not The Vital Question yet. In this talk and this talk he discusses some of the issues he writes about in the book.

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 9:11 PM Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear Friammers,

Today’s meeting of the Mother Church got back to our old discussions of complexity, gradients, and the origin of life. In that connection I urged everybody to read Nick Lane’s, THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life. The fundamental theory is that life was scaffolded by the microstructure and energy flows taking place in deep ocean vents called “white smokers”. I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think of it.

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Stephen Guerin-5

Re: Origins of Life

In reply to this post by Stephen Guerin-5

I composed my email before seeing Eric's post. Having now read his email, I would say let's not get too distracted by Nick Lane's Vital Question for the task we set ourselves at FRIAM.

I think Eric's talks bests represents what I was calling the view of life as gradient dissipation and a property of the ecological whole and less a property of an individual.

As a quick summary for the list, Nick and I have had a 10-year back and forth discussion on evolution since his arrival in Santa Fe. We are setting ourselves the task of coming to a common definition and perhaps explanation of mechanism. If we fail to come to agreement, we hope to at least be able to coherently state each other's position.

In this context, I was arguing that evolution is a description of the historical change of the pathways of breakdown (and local buildup) of gradients and that organisms (and by extension, species) are less a focus in this description. Tangents on the list into the dynamics of vortices and tornadoes have been related to the these arguments about far-from-equilibrium explanations.

At FRIAM, I argued that we need updated descriptions and explanations of Evolution in the same way that Chemistry has changed each time we discovered new concepts like conservation of mass, thermodynamics, the atom and quantum mechanics. Now that we have more modern descriptions of living systems and explanations of origin of life, shouldn't our descriptions and explanations of Evolution change along with it?

_______________________________________________________________________
[hidden email]

CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: <a href="tel:%28505%29995-0206" value="+15059950206" target="_blank">(505)995-0206 mobile: <a href="tel:%28505%29577-5828" value="+15055775828" target="_blank">(505)577-5828

twitter: @simtable

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 5:11 PM, Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

I downloaded Nick Lane's Vital Question book a couple months back. From a quick skim I got the sense it was a nice review of much of the work going on around non-equilibrium thermodynamic origin of life explanations by the "Seventh Day Ventists" (eg second law arguments for the emegence of life via gradient dissipation around deep sea vents). In addition to reviewing this work, Dr. Lane has original contributions as well. I would recommend it for anyone as a great introduction.

In fact our own Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz (who just passed last month) work is mentioned in Vital Question. You might check out Eric's recent talk at the Aspen Institute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cwvj0XBKlE) which addresses a couple questions that came up at FRIAM yesterday.

In particular, I think the talk much more elegantly describes the shift to defining life as an ecological pattern from the prior emphasis on the individual organism.

on "are viruses alive" Eric challenges the meaning of a "living thing"
https://youtu.be/0cwvj0XBKlE?t=48m21s

Also Eric's SFI public lecture from a few years back is very relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw

_______________________________________________________________________
[hidden email]
CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com
1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
office: <a href="tel:%28505%29995-0206" value="+15059950206" target="_blank">(505)995-0206 mobile: <a href="tel:%28505%29577-5828" value="+15055775828" target="_blank">(505)577-5828
twitter: @simtable

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 10:09 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
Dear Friammers,

Today’s meeting of the Mother Church got back to our old discussions of complexity, gradients, and the origin of life. In that connection I urged everybody to read Nick Lane’s, THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life. The fundamental theory is that life was scaffolded by the microstructure and energy flows taking place in deep ocean vents called “white smokers”. I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think of it.

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Robert Wall

Re: Origins of Life

Stephen,

Your discussion with Nick Thompson on the essence of Evolution sounds remarkably similar to the pre-Socratic arguments "between" Heraclitus and Parmenides on Being and Becoming. The modern version of this eternal discussion seems to have manifested in the metaphysical propositions of Process Philosophy that are substantially promoted in Alfred North Whitehead's seminal Process and Reality (1978).

"
Modern philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Charles Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, Alan Watts, Robert M. Pirsig, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare, Nicholas Rescher, Colin Wilson, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics Ilya Prigogine^[3] distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.
" - Wikipedia on Process Philosophy

I tend to lean in the same direction as you on this topic and I think that is why I have become a devoted student of complexity science (and process philosophy) and the idea of emergence; as Thomas Nagel argues in his Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialists Neo-Darwinian conception of Nature is almost certainly false (2012), not everything is reducible to Substance (atoms ... Being) as an explanation of its essence.

It seems to me that the "far-from-equilibrium surprises" that evolve through the unpredictable, stochastic process of evolution validate the idea that we live in a non-deterministic reality; but then this gets us into a long discussion or the essence of randomness--or is it just complexity? (local author George Johnson gets into this though in his Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (1996) :-) And the nature of Time gets muddled into the discussion as well-- see Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2014) by physicist Lee Smolin.

"
Now that we have more modern descriptions of living systems and explanations of origin of life, shouldn't our descriptions and explanations of Evolution change along with it?
" - Stephen Guerin

This conclusion was also reached back in 1989 by Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine in their Exploring Complexity.

"Our physical world is no longer symbolized by the stable and periodic planetary motions that are at the heart of classical mechanics. It is a world of instabilities and fluctuations, which are ultimately responsible for the amazing variety and richness of the forms and structures we see in nature around us. New concepts and new tools are clearly necessary to describe nature, in which evolution and pluralism become the key words." - Preface to Exploring Comnplexity (1989)

I like the series of books written by Nick Lane and see him as sort of the Carl Sagan of biological evolution. This is a good thing I believe. I have read some of them but not THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life (2015). However, this thread is good motivation to take the dive. :-)

This is all very interesting. Wish I knew more ... and probably said less ...

-Robert

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 6:04 PM, Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:

I composed my email before seeing Eric's post. Having now read his email, I would say let's not get too distracted by Nick Lane's Vital Question for the task we set ourselves at FRIAM.

I think Eric's talks bests represents what I was calling the view of life as gradient dissipation and a property of the ecological whole and less a property of an individual.

As a quick summary for the list, Nick and I have had a 10-year back and forth discussion on evolution since his arrival in Santa Fe. We are setting ourselves the task of coming to a common definition and perhaps explanation of mechanism. If we fail to come to agreement, we hope to at least be able to coherently state each other's position.

In this context, I was arguing that evolution is a description of the historical change of the pathways of breakdown (and local buildup) of gradients and that organisms (and by extension, species) are less a focus in this description. Tangents on the list into the dynamics of vortices and tornadoes have been related to the these arguments about far-from-equilibrium explanations.

At FRIAM, I argued that we need updated descriptions and explanations of Evolution in the same way that Chemistry has changed each time we discovered new concepts like conservation of mass, thermodynamics, the atom and quantum mechanics. Now that we have more modern descriptions of living systems and explanations of origin of life, shouldn't our descriptions and explanations of Evolution change along with it?

_______________________________________________________________________
[hidden email]
CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com
1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
office: <a href="tel:%28505%29995-0206" value="+15059950206" target="_blank">(505)995-0206 mobile: <a href="tel:%28505%29577-5828" value="+15055775828" target="_blank">(505)577-5828
twitter: @simtable

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 5:11 PM, Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]> wrote:
Nick,

I downloaded Nick Lane's Vital Question book a couple months back. From a quick skim I got the sense it was a nice review of much of the work going on around non-equilibrium thermodynamic origin of life explanations by the "Seventh Day Ventists" (eg second law arguments for the emegence of life via gradient dissipation around deep sea vents). In addition to reviewing this work, Dr. Lane has original contributions as well. I would recommend it for anyone as a great introduction.

In fact our own Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz (who just passed last month) work is mentioned in Vital Question. You might check out Eric's recent talk at the Aspen Institute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cwvj0XBKlE) which addresses a couple questions that came up at FRIAM yesterday.

In particular, I think the talk much more elegantly describes the shift to defining life as an ecological pattern from the prior emphasis on the individual organism.

on "are viruses alive" Eric challenges the meaning of a "living thing"
https://youtu.be/0cwvj0XBKlE?t=48m21s

Also Eric's SFI public lecture from a few years back is very relevant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw

_______________________________________________________________________
[hidden email]
CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com
1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
office: <a href="tel:%28505%29995-0206" value="+15059950206" target="_blank">(505)995-0206 mobile: <a href="tel:%28505%29577-5828" value="+15055775828" target="_blank">(505)577-5828
twitter: @simtable

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 10:09 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:
Dear Friammers,

Today’s meeting of the Mother Church got back to our old discussions of complexity, gradients, and the origin of life. In that connection I urged everybody to read Nick Lane’s, THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life. The fundamental theory is that life was scaffolded by the microstructure and energy flows taking place in deep ocean vents called “white smokers”. I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think of it.

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

gepr

Re: Origins of Life

It's very nice to have a bunch of related links packed into a post like that. Thanks, Robert.

On 04/26/2016 04:52 PM, Robert Wall wrote:

> Stephen,
>
> Your discussion with Nick Thompson on the essence of Evolution sounds remarkably similar to the pre-Socratic arguments "between" Heraclitus and Parmenides on Being <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being> and Becoming <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_%28philosophy%29>. The modern version of this eternal discussion seems to have manifested in the metaphysical propositions of Process Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/process-philosophy/> that are substantially promoted in Alfred North Whitehead's seminal /Process and Reality/ (1978).
>
> "
> Modern philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Nietzsche <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche>, Heidegger <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger>, Charles Peirce <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce>, Alfred North Whitehead <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead>, Alan Watts <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts>, Robert M. Pirsig <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig>, Charles Hartshorne <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hartshorne>, Arran Gare <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arran_Gare>, Nicholas Rescher <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Rescher>, Colin Wilson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wilson>, and Gilles Deleuze <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze>. In physics Ilya Prigogine <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine>^[3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy#cite_note-3> distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming".
> Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.
> " - Wikipedia on Process Philosophy
>
>
> I tend to lean in the same direction as you on this topic and I think that is why I have become a devoted student of complexity science (and process philosophy) and the idea of emergence; as Thomas Nagel argues in his /Mind and Cosmos: Why the materialists Neo-Darwinian conception of Nature is almost certainly false/ (2012), not everything is reducible to Substance (atoms ... Being) as an explanation of its essence.
>
> It seems to me that the "far-from-equilibrium surprises" that evolve through the unpredictable, stochastic process of evolution validate the idea that we live in a non-deterministic reality; but then this gets us into a long discussion or the essence of randomness--or is it just complexity? (local author George Johnson gets into this though in his /Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order/ (1996) :-) And the nature of Time gets muddled into the discussion as well-- see /Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe/ (2014) by physicist Lee Smolin.
>
> "
> Now that we have more modern descriptions of living systems and explanations of origin of life, shouldn't our descriptions and explanations of Evolution change along with it?
> " - Stephen Guerin
>
>
> This conclusion was also reached back in 1989 by Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine in their /Exploring Complexity/.
>
> "Our physical world is no longer symbolized by the stable and periodic planetary motions that are at the heart of classical mechanics. It is a world of instabilities and fluctuations, which are ultimately responsible for the amazing variety and richness of the forms and structures we see in nature around us. New concepts and new tools are clearly necessary to describe nature, in which evolution and pluralism become the key words." - /Preface /to /Exploring Comnplexity/ (1989)
>
>
> I like the series of books written by Nick Lane and see him as sort of the Carl Sagan of biological evolution. This is a good thing I believe. I have read some of them but not /THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life (2015)./ However, this thread is good motivation to take the dive. :-)
>
> This is all very interesting. Wish I knew more ... and probably said less ...
>
> -Robert
>
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 6:04 PM, Stephen Guerin <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> I composed my email before seeing Eric's post. Having now read his email, I would say let's not get too distracted by Nick Lane's Vital Question for the task we set ourselves at FRIAM.
>
> I think Eric's talks bests represents what I was calling the view of life as gradient dissipation and a property of the ecological whole and less a property of an individual.
>
> As a quick summary for the list, Nick and I have had a 10-year back and forth discussion on evolution since his arrival in Santa Fe. We are setting ourselves the task of coming to a common definition and perhaps explanation of mechanism. If we fail to come to agreement, we hope to at least be able to coherently state each other's position.
>
> In this context, I was arguing that evolution is a description of the historical change of the pathways of breakdown (and local buildup) of gradients and that organisms (and by extension, species) are less a focus in this description. Tangents on the list into the dynamics of vortices and tornadoes have been related to the these arguments about far-from-equilibrium explanations.
>
> At FRIAM, I argued that we need updated descriptions and explanations of Evolution in the same way that Chemistry has changed each time we discovered new concepts like conservation of mass, thermodynamics, the atom and quantum mechanics. Now that we have more modern descriptions of living systems and explanations of origin of life, shouldn't our descriptions and explanations of Evolution change along with it?
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
> CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com <http://www.simtable.com/>
> 1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
> office: (505)995-0206 <tel:%28505%29995-0206> mobile: (505)577-5828 <tel:%28505%29577-5828>
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>
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 5:11 PM, Stephen Guerin <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> Nick,
>
> I downloaded Nick Lane's Vital Question book a couple months back. From a quick skim I got the sense it was a nice review of much of the work going on around non-equilibrium thermodynamic origin of life explanations by the "Seventh Day Ventists" (eg second law arguments for the emegence of life via gradient dissipation around deep sea vents). In addition to reviewing this work, Dr. Lane has original contributions as well. I would recommend it for anyone as a great introduction.
>
> In fact our own Eric Smith and Harold Morowitz (who just passed last month) work is mentioned in Vital Question. You might check out Eric's recent talk at the Aspen Institute (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cwvj0XBKlE) which addresses a couple questions that came up at FRIAM yesterday.
>
> In particular, I think the talk much more elegantly describes the shift to defining life as an ecological pattern from the prior emphasis on the individual organism.
>
> on "are viruses alive" Eric challenges the meaning of a "living thing"
> https://youtu.be/0cwvj0XBKlE?t=48m21s
>
> Also Eric's SFI public lecture from a few years back is very relevant:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> [hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>
> CEO, Simtable http://www.simtable.com <http://www.simtable.com/>
> 1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505
> office: (505)995-0206 <tel:%28505%29995-0206> mobile: (505)577-5828 <tel:%28505%29577-5828>
> twitter: @simtable
>
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 10:09 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>
> Dear Friammers, ____
>
> __ __
>
> Today’s meeting of the Mother Church got back to our old discussions of complexity, gradients, and the origin of life. In that connection I urged everybody to read Nick Lane’s, */THE VITAL QUESTION: Energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life./* The fundamental theory is that life was scaffolded by the microstructure and energy flows taking place in deep ocean vents called “white smokers”. I am curious to know if others have read this book, and what you might think of it. ____
>
> __ __
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson____
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology____
>
> Clark University____
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>____
>
> __ __
>
>
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--
⇔ glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen