Thank you for asking me to comment. This view fits what I have tried to convey over many years (decades in fact), beginning with books published essentially in French (hence not widely read). It is important to understand, in this context, that my views and scenarios keep evolving. After having identified "information" as a key currency for any scenario involving life, first discussed in a book which, this time, exists in English (The Delphic Boat, Harvard University Press, 2003) I have progressively better and better understood a basic principle of physics, the so-called Landauer principle (1961 !), which, to my view is key to understand the "animation" of chemical biology. It would be too long to discuss this here but you may find a variety of reflections associated with this view in articles and at my site :

https://www.normalesup.org/~adanchin/en.html

FEMSRE DOI:10.1111/j.1574-6976.2008.00137.x

EMBO reports (2011) 12, 495–499. doi:10.1038/embor.2011.83

Article The Emergence of the First Cells

Beilstein J. Org. Chem. 2017, 13, 1119–1135. doi:10.3762/bjoc.13.111

Microbial Biotechnology (2019) 12(2), 210–242 doi:10.1111/1751-7915.13378

Synthetic Biology, 2021, ysab010 doi: 10.1093/synbio/ysab010

Environmental Microbiology, 2022, 1–15. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/1462-2920.16140

and for a reflection on science and rationality

Microbial Biotechnology, 16, 1888–1894. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.14315

Hi Antoine Danchin interesting response. When I was reading your reflection on science and rationality, I was laughing out loud. My wife, knowing what I was reading, could not imagine that there could be humor involved in any way. I couldn't help thinking of some old science guy telling the new science kids, "In my day we did real science!" The humorous part of it all is the degree to which I agree with your sentiments. I remember watching a presentation by a prominent origin of life researcher, who's name escapes me at the moment, his point was that the actual practice of science is a world away from the scientific method. I found that interesting as I am an engineer in my daily life and I use the "engineering method" every day. All day.

I do differ with your use of the term "critical thinking." Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point, but I think of the pursuit of science as a creative process and critical thinking (and the scientific method) is applied to those creations. Science doesn't tell us how to come up with our novel ideas and novel theories, but it says that you must use a procedure to make sure they have some relationship to the real world. I don't see critical thinking as a creative process but as an analytical one. And I see the problem you are describing as one inherent to the practice of science as I understand it: Scientists are selected from populations that are really good at analytical thinking. Populations that are relatively bad at creative thinking. Then, when we ask them to solve a problem that requires a real creative leap, we are amazed that it takes generations to accomplish.

In terms of the Origin of Life problem, or more properly, the Theory Of What Life Is problem, if we need a creative leap similar to the leap Einstein had to make when he determined that particles and waves were different expressions of the same underlying phenomenon, we will have to wait for someone with both creative and analytical genius, like Einstein had, to figure out what life is. Or we could allow creative people to practice science and support them with analytical people.

Of course I, like the next guy, have a theory of what life is. And I think my theory checks most of the boxes in my list of requirements. I think most of the others may check one or two boxes on the list. I've watched really highly analytical people try to come up with creative solutions to this problem. It may be that what we have in this field is all that scientists can do. I don't think of them as being at fault, I think it is the system that has been built that will only allow the extremely rare, creative-analytical scientific genius, on the order of Einsteinian genius, to solve this problem.

I solved the problem of what life is long ago. It was easy and I figured someone else would figure it out, so I went on about my business doing other things. When I picked this up again 30 years later, I was amazed that it hadn't been figured out. So now, I'm working on my theory in earnest. I'm still amazed that ResearchGate allowed me in with my seriously inadequate credentials. I think I was rejected years ago, but I have one work to my name that SSRN published. Seems that might have gotten me over the hump.

I enjoyed reading your articles. They were a blast.

-leonard

Dear Leonard, dear All,

I just wanted to let you know that I put a similiar (albeit rather short...) question to the RG community a while ago:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_state-of-the-art_definition_of_life_used_in_astrobiology_today

There were a few responses. But I am still looking for a fully satisfactory answer...

Thank you,

Julius

Hi Julius Riese I don't know what the state of the art definition of life is for the astrobiology/origin of life community is. My point in this post is that we can conceptualize what an ideal "Theory Of What Life Is" might be. We can then see how close to the ideal any proposed theory of what life is, or a definition of life, can come to that ideal. Then the one that is the closest would be the "best" or "state of the art." As you may know, the Origin of Life community is composed of camps that push for various theories: The "RNA world," "metabolism first," "warm little pond," "alkaline ocean vent," etc. Some of these theories are in conflict with one another.

My position on all of the theories/definitions that I've seen so far is that they have a slew of failings. I do like the ones that try to tell me what the true nature of this thing we call "life" is (#1 in my list above). Even those that fail magnificently at that task, are great tries.

Those theories/definitions that don't try to meet #1 in my list start off at a huge deficit. They are hoping, by their efforts, to be able to create a simple living system and from that system deduce the true nature of what life is. So what their definitions/theories represent are possible paths to a simple living system. Then from there to a theory of what life is. Everyone is arguing about these possible paths to a simple living system. They form their camps and toss insults at the other side. It's quite the thing to read some of those articles.

Maybe it is not clear to the people involved in this research, that the effort to create a "simple living system" is based on the idea of "I'll know life when I see it" because they'd have to recognize that the simple living system is, in fact, alive. That's no simple feat if you don't already have a theory of what life is. It's a really nasty catch-22.

NASA's definition of life is the currently accepted one. And it tries to map what we know about life on Earth to life elsewhere. That's a safe thing to do. The definition represents an attempt to "get on with it" even though they don't have a theory of what life is. I view their position as, "We'll know its alive when it does everything that living things that we all agree are alive do." And they also avoid all of the controversies in the OOL community.

-leonard

I said above, "Maybe it is not clear to the people involved in this research, that the effort to create a "simple living system" is based on the idea of "I'll know life when I see it" because they'd have to recognize that the simple living system is, in fact, alive. That's no simple feat if you don't already have a theory of what life is. It's a really nasty catch-22."

As an example, the Preprint A roadmap towards the synthesis of Life

In the absence of a workable theory, this research falls back to a definition which lists the hallmarks of living things that we have mostly agreed upon. The authors say, "Instead of attempting to define life, we could identify a list of hallmarks, such as metabolism, compartmentalization, replication, motility, and response to stimuli, and try to incorporate these into non-living systems." Then they go on to say, "Yet, because life is not modular in a technical sense, synthesizing a system that contains some of life’s hallmarks may not give us synthetic life—for instance, a motile compartment that can divide and has a metabolic reaction network does not qualify as synthetic life." Then the authors "get on with it" by stating, "Instead, we should aim for an autonomous chemical system that can undergo open-ended evolution," which is essentially an ad hoc strategy in that the requirement does not follow from any kind of theory but hopes to achieve a specified goal. It's difficult to call this trial and error, since the folks that are proposing and putting together these systems that could lead to a simple living system, are really accomplished, but that's what this is in the absence of a theory of what life is.

Let me be more clear, it does not follow that if you put together a simple living system that satisfies their definition of life, "a self-sustaining chemical system from nonliving matter capable of open-ended evolution," that from such a system you will necessarily gain some insight into what life is. As I've stated elsewhere, Chapter Life and Life on Earth: A Fully Functional Theory of What Li...

However, if the intent is to "just get on with it," to achieve some other goal such as to reap the economic benefits of the research, then none of my observations apply. This becomes more of an engineering endeavor than a scientific one.

-leonard

Dear Leonard,

I agree that the artificial synthesis/engineered re-creation of life is something fundamentally different from origin of life research as well as from modelling a general theory of life or crafting a comprehensive definition of life. Nevertheless, I do think that as astrobiologists (i.e., scientists concerned with the phenomenon we call "life" in the universe as a whole) we need some fresh ideas on rethinking about what - conceptually - we're talking about when referring to "life". I am not sure whether NASA's working definition suffices.

Is your own work on the topic already publicly available as a book?

Always interested to read and learn about new advancements in the field...

Best,

Julius

Hi Julius Riese , the answer to your question, "Is your own work on the topic already publicly available as a book?" is no. I'm acting as an independent researcher and as such, I'd like to exploit my theory myself. If I make it public, I'll lose the ability to do that.

I am, however, looking for a someone to confidentially review my theory of what life is. I'm looking for someone who could say that I've actually solved the problem and their opinion would carry some weight because of who they are and the prior work they've done. I'd then allow others with more substantial reputations to confidentially review the work. Eventually, I hope to attract funding interest. I don't see another path that allows me to exploit my discovery.

My theory is fully functional. It satisfies most of the requirements that I mentioned above. In particular it satisfies: 5) The theory should assert and explain how it can derive the precursors to metabolism, the electron transport chain, cellular membranes, cell walls, information storage, and information translation... I can derive most of these properties of life from first principles. I don't think any other researcher can say, "I can derive metabolism."

-leonard

Hi there Leonard,

perhaps a possibility for you would be to present a selected number of your findings (not all) at a conference or in a journal paper? This would allow you to have some of your results reviewed and discussed while at the same time not giving everything away at once.

Let us know should you be releasing anything! I'd certainly be looking forward to it.

Best,

Julius

Hi Julius Riese , I won't be releasing anything in the near future. I am, however. interested in having someone privately review what I've written in an appropriate way. The problem with a conceptual barrier, is that everyone is dancing around it. It takes the displacement of a few nanometers to hit on it.

-leonard