Emergence of complexity in the origin and early evolution of life
Jacobo Aguirre
Centro de Astrobiología CSIC-INTA
Carretera de Torrejón a Ajalvir km 4, 28850 Torrejón de Ardoz, Madrid, Spain
Unraveling the origin of life, and how the road to life was punctuated by transitions toward complexity, from astrochemistry to biomolecules and eventually to living organisms, remains one of the greatest challenges that humanity faces. Since Oparin's groundbreaking article a century ago, various scientific disciplines have approached this problem from isolated perspectives. Despite the remarkable progress made, achieving these ambitious goals still entails significant difficulties, and disruptive and more interdisciplinary, holistic approaches have been advocated recently as the way forward.
In this seminar, I will address the main unresolved difficulties associated with the field of the origin and early evolution of life and explore how complexity science, in harmony with recent advances in data science, can play a pivotal role in tackling them. In addition, I will describe several theoretical, modeling and computational approaches under development in our research group [1-3], outlining the opportunities for complexity theory and network science in different scenarios of increasing complexity related to the origin of life. These scenarios range from interstellar astrochemistry, where life's most basic building blocks are formed, to the emergence of molecular complexity during prebiotic chemistry, and finally to more complex molecular self-organization levels leading to the first replicative cell.
Slides of the seminar (pdf)
[1] M. Fernández-Ruz, I. Jiménez-Serra and J. Aguirre, A theoretical approach to the complex chemical evolution of phosphorus in the interstellar medium, Astrophysical Journal 956, 47 (2023).
[2] M. García-Sánchez, I. Jiménez-Serra, F. Puente-Sánchez, J. Aguirre, The emergence of interstellar molecular complexity explained by interacting networks, PNAS 119 (30), e2119734119 (2022).
[3] J. Aguirre, Life finds a way, Nature Ecology & Evolution 6 (11), 1599 (2022).
