assembly

Exploring the origin and nature of Life

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. 

assembly
We define assembly as the total amount of selection necessary to produce an ensemble of observed objects. Assembly quantifies two competing effects, the difficulty of discovering new objects, but, once discovered, some objects become easier to make; this is indicative of how selection was required to discover and make them.

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. 

ants
planetary network

Life and Intelligence as Planetary Scale Processes

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. 

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. 

exoplanets