Physical Society Colloquium

Reinventing the Sacred: Science, Faith and Complexity

Stuart Kauffman

University of Calgary

I propose to discuss two topics: Several alternative theories and experimental work bearing on the origin of molecular reproduction. Here we at least think we know what we are talking about. But agency, the capacity of organisms to act on their own behalf, hence “doing”, and value, have entered to biosphere, but are not in physics where only happenings occur. On the first topic I will discuss the classical view that life must be based on template replicated DNA, RNA or their cousins, the RNA world, the membrane-cell first world, my own work on the emergence of collectively autocatalytic sets of organic molecules and polymers, experimental evidence for collectively autocatalytic sets of DNA and peptide sequences, and our own and other workers' evidence that random peptides fold, at least to molten globules, hence may well have catalytic activity. On the second topic I will discuss the tentative definition that a minimum molecular autonomous agent is a self reproducing molecular system that also does at least one thermodynamic work cycle. Work cycles are necessarily non-equilibrium, so agency is non-equilibrium, and in life links exergonic and endergonic processes. More, work is the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. But it typically takes work to construct those very constraints. Something new enters physics here - propagating organization of process where work constructs constraints on the release of energy, the resulting work does many things including constructing more constraints on the release of energy until a cycle of these processes closes on itself and a cell builds a rough copy of itself. We have no theory for propagating organization of process.