Origins of Life

The Origins of Life lies at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and geology. For more than 50 years, the field has largely assumed that appropriately integrating and extrapolating established sciences would solve the puzzle of biogenesis. However, life and its origins are emergent, and emergent phenomena are not recoverable by extrapolation from their constituents. 

This meeting charts a new course: the Origins of Life as a discipline in its own right, one that builds its own concepts, methods, and standards of explanation, drawing on the established sciences without being reducible to them. Such a discipline will be non-teleological, and will work without the survivorship bias that follows from reasoning backward from life as we find it. It will, for example, extend evolutionary principles (variation, selection, ratcheting, and persistence) to chemical systems driven by planetary processes, where planetary dynamics ratchets chemistry away from equilibrium and chemical selection acts on interacting networks rather than individual molecules, where life emerges as a continuous, dynamic property of planetary chemical evolution.