A – Origin of life in evolution – Biology – our incomplete fundamental science

Just to pique your interest and raise your expectations, here’s a short blog note on current currents in biology that promise changes in our understanding of life. I’ve already mentioned here the professional association called The Third Way of Evolution where eminent evolutionary biologists are espousing a path that is neither neo-Darwinism nor creationism. Three new books reflect this current – “Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity,” “Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems,” and “Phenotypic Plasticity and Evolution: Causes, Consequences, Controversies.” Among others.

But beyond the noise in evolutionary theory (not against Darwinism, by the way, but just against the genetic reductionism of neo-Darwinism), there are deeper issues going on in biology itself. These come on several fronts – the strong turn to exploring the origin of life begun around the turn of the century, the strong interest in development and physiology as supplementary sources for evolutionary change as

While the winds of change are stirring across evolutionary theory, there is larger, long-term current of change approaching from chemistry. The chemists have a claim that chemical evolution is the real basis of evolution while species evolution is a secondary process (Williams & Frausto da Silva 2006; Williams & Rickaby 2012). At the same time there are many origin-of-life researchers who are studying how prebiotic chemistry could lead to life, and they are making rapid progress. They are effectively studying a chemical evolution that occurred for hundreds of millions of years before the first cell or before any life as we know it. And some of these same researchers see the species concept as a secondary phenomenon to the biosphere as a whole (Smith & Morowitz 2016).

Most of us assume that chemistry is what living organisms use for their lives. This suite of ideas from chemical evolution, biosphere primacy, and prebiotic chemistry sees evolution as a big, changing current driven by energy that gets its chemical energy organized and partitioned by different forms of life. Chemical evolution is seen to be primary, and the evolution of organisms or

Biology – our incomplete fundamental science

A – Origin of life in evolution

The coming revolution in biology

The Chemical Side of Evolution