We are Exploring the origin and Nature of Life on Earth and other worlds...
Our lab primarily focuses our research on the problem of what life is, whether biological or technological, and whether it first emerged or evolved here on Earth or perhaps, somewhere else in the universe. As part of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, we explore answering questions at the edge of science - what are usually referred to as the "big questions". "What is life?" is certainly a big question, and as such it touches on many of the other deep existential open areas of research that are active right now, including questions around causation, time, agency, consciousness, artificial and synthetic life, artificial intelligence and our planetary future. To understand life we recognize it is important to study living processes across many scales: from the microscale interactions of the chemistry happening within cells to the macroscale interactions of societies and planets.
Find out more about our work below, or by reading our team's publications here. Interested to join our team? Contact PI Sara Walker (sara.i.walker@asu.edu) or see our open positions here.
Find out more about our work below, or by reading our team's publications here. Interested to join our team? Contact PI Sara Walker (sara.i.walker@asu.edu) or see our open positions here.
Assembly Theory and Solving the Origin of Life
How does life emerge? This has proven to be one of the most stubborn open questions of modern science. Our lack of understanding is not for lack of effort - the origin of life has been a serious scientific research field for > 100 years. Yet, we are still casting about in the dark: attempts to generate life, be they spontaneous or engineered, have so far not yielded success. We are working together with our collaborators to develop a new theory - assembly theory - which aims to explain how the universe generates complexity and why that is deeply connected to the phenomenon of life. Assembly theory has so far been developed as a means to experimentally distinguish molecules that could only have been produced by a living system, and as a quantitative approach to determining how much causation and selection was necessary to generate a given ensemble of objects. We are now using the theory to predict the origin of life transition - defined rigorously as the transition from when the universe explores randomly the space of possibilities to when selection must occur only along specific trajectories through the space of what is possible.
Information in Living Systems
Our daily lives are dictated by information flows, via interactions within both virtual and physical spaces. But, how fundamental is information to life? And, can information uniquely characterize life? We are approaching these and related questions by studying how information structures living matter across a variety of length and time scales in biology, including identifying how information is organized in life and how biological systems control information flows. Currently, our work focuses on gene regulatory networks, planaria regeneration, and social decision-making.
Life and Intelligence as Planetary Scale Processes
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Living systems persist across a huge span of space and time scales, from the microscale interactions happening within your cells (assuming you are not a bot) to the global organization of modern society and its impact on geobiochemical cycles. We are approaching the problem of understanding how life organizes across these many scales by developing a planetary-scale understanding of both life and intelligence. This work ranges from quantitative approaches to characterizing life's chemistry as a planetary-scale network to more speculative and philosophical forward-looking work on the nature of intelligence as a planetary process.
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The Search for Alien Life
Are we alone? Answering this question requires knowing what we mean by 'we' - that is by identifying what we could possibly share with alien life. So far, much of astrobiology has focused on looking for molecular signatures indicative of life on Earth. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that any biosignature molecule we might identify is likely subject to false positives, fooling us into thinking we may have discovered life when we did not. We are working on statistical frameworks for identifying life that mitigate this issue and developing new, systems-level biosignatures that are likely to persist independent of the particular chemistry of life.