Coming Into Being: An Origin of Life Theory

Solving the mystery of how life on earth began around 4 billion years ago would fundamentally transform our understanding of what life most essentially is, but also who and what we are, providing a vantage point from which we may truly begin to realise our place and purpose in the universe. It is not surprising therefore that creation mythologies are the foundations of most religious doctrines - accounting for the mysterious transitioning of the life-less into the living as a divine act. But if we seek an explanation that does not involve supernatural interventions, we are faced with the daunting challenge of determining how and why the physics and chemistry of the non-living universe at some point in the past came to spontaneously create a completely new existential reality. The modern quest for a scientific explanation focuses on understanding the processes that generate the molecular building blocks of life and drive the transition to emergent biological entities. But we should be mindful that this is to understand only part of a greater whole. Life is more than simply a collection of materials and processes. Ultimately, to determine how life came into being we will need to explain how all the things that constitute a living existence were prescribed in that moment of creation. This is a formidable task because there are so many aspects of life and living that we don’t yet fully understand and in some cases find unable to even define. Then there is the singular mystery to solve at the heart of life’s coming into being. We typically view the events in the universe unfolding as cause and effect – the new having roots in what has come before. But living organisms exhibit qualities and properties that do not appear to be present in the non-living universe; so where have they come from? This conundrum applies not only to what life is, but also to what life does. Indeed, we most commonly distinguish between the living and lifeless through differences in behaviour rather than in material composition, and living organisms exhibit motivations that are fundamentally at odds with, and have no precedents in, the non-living universe. There are, then, formidable questions a theory of life has to answer. How can an unknowing universe give birth to consciousness? How can the non-living, aimless, randomly unfolding universe give birth to the self-determined, purposeful, goal-directed behaviours of the living? ‘Coming Into Being’ presents a new theory of the origin of life that attempts to address these complex issues. By effectively ‘reverse-engineering’ the momentums driving living behaviour and with a purview that embraces the multidimensional nature of a living existence, the theory proposes four conditions that in concert would be capable of facilitating the emergence of life from a lifeless antecedent. Founded on well-established scientific principles, the original aspect of this proposal is in demonstrating how a particular conjunction of components can give rise to a self-sustaining process from which all the materials and behaviour that define living organisms can emerge.