There are various angles to be taken about the nature of life and how it came into existence. One question in open play right now with the discovery of so many planets throughout our own galaxy and even other galaxies is: Does life come into existence as a result of processes likely to occur often or is it something likely to come into existence very rarely? A related question is: Can we even determine if life exists out there before we find a way to get to other stars?
Some of the most important issues can be labeled as `physics’; if these prove dominant, a proposition argued against by many scientists and some engineers, then we’ll be able to decide pretty definitively if there is likely to be a lot of life out there in this universe; if not, then we may have to regard the question as a purely empirical matter to be settled only by finding evidence of life, or lots of life, out there.
In an overview article, A New Physics Theory of Life, we can read:
Why does life exist?
Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.
Read the entire article for a very interesting perspective on life from a viewpoint which hints of reductionism but such viewpoints have often produced good results and have been folded into larger and richer understandings.
My opinion is that this is an empirical question, though certainly one with mathematical aspects.
In any case, The article is about a physicist who has proposed a profoundly clever answer I find too neat and straightforward for this world, but that’s a matter of intuition which, as I’ve explained before, is a feeling for reality built into our brains by natural selection—it reflects some serious amount of truth of a utilitarian sort which is to say that it corresponds to some aspects of reality well enough to have allowed survival of family-lines. Intuition, even that of a Plato or an Einstein, is most certainly not guaranteed to be true. Our intuitions are correlated with truth. There is no strict linkage nor is there only an accidental relationship.
In any case, I find it quite plausible that Professor England’s answer might be part of a more complex answer. He implies in his words as recorded in this article that is the case and the more profound answer lies in the relationships between physical entities in this universe. Though it be quite wrong to think of the universe as being an organism, it’s equally wrong to think of it as inert, a mere setting for things to happen leading to life and then to the evolution of a great variety of species and individuals. One part of the work of Professor England is the admission that the physical universe is active in ways that lead to organization of various sorts and at various scales of spacetime.
Near the end of the article, we can read a comment by Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University:
If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.
And this seems to be part of what I’m claiming: life, like the human mind, is shaped by active responses to what lies around it; thus it is what lies around us which gives us, and bacteria, possibilities. I should also note that my relatively casual readings in evolutionary biology, including that strain of thought found in books about the brain, would lead me to claim that the serious thinkers in the field already know and advocate what Louis says in the above quote, though those other thinkers probably haven’t stated their positions in quite the clean and potentially useful way that England has of dealing with the issue. When they are truly appropriate, well-defined mathematical models of processes or entities are truly useful.