“Out-of-the-Organics-Box” Reflections On and Scenarios for Life’s Emergence

Dear Colleagues,

The prevalent hypothesis for how life may have come into existence on our planet envisages an (extraterrestrial or terrestrial) abiotic synthesis of organic molecules which are posited to then having more or less spontaneously self-organized into first living entities. While this notion is still dominating both the scientific discourse and the narrative promoted in interested lay communities, it is increasingly questioned by a host of different scientific disciplines from physics (thermodynamics), through biology (microbial bioenergetics) to information theory. The main arguments put forward against an organics-driven emergence of life gravitate around its infinite thermodynamic unlikelihood and its conspicuous neglect of the crucial role of inorganic elements in the functioning of all extent life on our planet.

Over the last few decades, approaches attempting to remedy these fundamental shortcomings of the “organic molecules giving birth to life” paradigm and proposing more plausible scenarios have been put forward. Being rooted in very diverse disciplines (theoretical thermodynamics, systems biology, information theory, mineralogy, inorganic chemistry and the likes), they tend to appear disparate although frequently converging on common principles. This Special Issue in Life intends to provide a forum for investigating the problems of the traditional organics-centered paradigm, discuss ways to overcome these problems and to propose scenarios which are not only paleogeochemically and thermodynamically plausible but moreover yield projected forms of early living entities that reproduce at least part of the characteristics of extant life on Earth.

As Guest Editor of this Special Issue, I would like to draw the attention of potential contributors to this latter criterion. Of course, we cannot rule out that the earliest form of life started out very differently from the astoundingly homogeneous biology we observe on modern Earth. If this is the case, “research” into its emergence would be bound to forever remain speculative and unconstrained by empirical evidences, that is, more philosophical than scientific. However, during recent years, a growing number of hypotheses have positioned extant life as a guiding rod in elaborating emergence scenarios, and it is such articles which are targeted for this Special iIsue. I strongly believe that more than enough scenarios (even paleogeochemically plausible ones) proposing truly “alien” early life are already out there in the literature, and I therefore would discourage such kinds of speculations to be submitted to this Special Issue.

Dr. Wolfgang Nitschke
Guest Editor

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• emergence of life
• thermodynamics
• bioenergetics
• information theory
• early metabolism
• metal ions in biochemistry