Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life

by Prof. Stuart Kauffman

Tuesday 4 Apr 2017, 16:00 → 18:00 Europe/Rome

Aula Conversi (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. G. Marconi)

In this talk I discuss a vast topic: the emergence and evolution of life. I believe this “becoming” is based “on” but “beyond” physics. Prebiotic chemistry saw the evolution of complex organic reaction networks and low energy structures, for instance membranes. Thence the spontaneous emergence of self-reproducing molecular systems could arise and evolve. Such “collectively autocatalytic systems” cyclically link non-equilibrium processes, whose constrained releases of energy constitute “work” that is done to construct the same constraints on those non-equilibrium processes. I’ll discuss this “constraint closure” as recently introduced by Montetvil and Mossio. I’ll also discuss how cells yoke a set of non-equilibrium processes and constraints on the energy released as work to build their own constraints or boundary conditions, and reproduce. In doing so they do thermodynamic work cycles and, being living systems, they propagate their organization with heritable variations ! subject t o natural selection. In this picture the ever-changing phase space of evolution includes “unprestatable” new functionalities. I’ll argue that all this implies that we cannot write laws of motion for this evolution, which is therefore entailed by no laws at all, and thus not reducible to physics.