Explaining Life by Explaining it Away — February 6th, 2010 by Douglas Axe
Reading Stuart Kauffman’s book At Home in the Universe some fourteen years ago, I encountered the following:
I hope to persuade you that life is a natural property of complex chemical systems, that when the number of different kinds of molecules in a chemical soup passes a certain threshold, a self-sustaining network of reactions—an autocatalytic metabolism—will suddenly appear. Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and whole, and has remained complex and whole ever since… The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be found in the beauty of Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of catalytic closure. [1]
When chemicals react, they produce different chemicals. So the idea here—call it Kauffman’s conjecture—was that mixtures with a sufficient number of different chemicals are bound to give rise to local compositions that continually replenish themselves through a self-catalyzed network of chemical reactions. Those special compositions would typically differ from the original mixture, but since they make more of themselves, they should be able to ‘grow’ by establishing themselves repeatedly in local pockets. The ability to propagate in this way, if proven, would be something like reproduction, only at the low level of chemical composition rather than at the high level of organismal form. more…