When you go from
to
I cry bootstrapping! You are applying the Münchhausen strategy here, and while it is true that
it still relies on life (humans) setting it up. But OK, it is an argument, just because you have not convinced me you must not be wrong. But it has a whiff of kitchen platonism in my perception. I am a platonist myself, but I don’t buy it.
It is late in Europe, please excuse me if I don’t answer soon to your next reply, if you choose to prolong this argument.
The computer and the software the simulation runs on are all ‘artificial’, i.e. created by humans. But they don’t dictate that the game, as directed by four simple rules and an initial condition that is in no way influenced by a user through its evolution, should produce any kind of order. The organization that results is a purely emergent property that just happens as the scenario develops. That it is a simulation runs on a computer rather than in the natural world is purely for convenience (and to constrain the possible external influences that might actually impose order) but there is nothing about the system that forces it to develop complexity, and in fact sometimes it does not.
And again, this is far from the only example of cellular automata which occur at every physical macroscale in nature, albeit often in ways that are transient or occur on timescales are are difficult to observe. This emergence of organized complexity is an apparent feature of reality. Whether it is the fundamental organizing principle behind living systems or not is an unknown, hence why it is described as a hypothesis and as noted unfalsifiable for life on Earth, but if we saw the emergence of a self-organizing system in a lab into something that displays self-directed behavior it would certainly buttress that hypothesis as being viable and perhaps even likely depending on the propensity of the system toward order.
Stranger
I found 2 scientific papers relevant to the OP. In Chemical Systems Involving Two Competitive Self-Catalytic Reactions (2019) Sawato et al of Tohoku University in Japan describe competing chemical processes both in theory and in a range of experimental settings. Small environmental changes can trigger large effects. PDF.
In Self-Reproduction and Darwinian Evolution in Autocatalytic Chemical Reaction Systems (2021), Ameta et al of the Simons Centre for the Study of Living Machines, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India reviews experimental work with autocatalytic chemical systems and report demonstrations of chemical self-reproduction under specific conditions.
Helpfully, the paper identifies and discusses 3 characteristics of Darwinian evolution. There are (i) variation, (ii) heredity, and (iii) differential fitness.1 They characterize this as canonical Darwinian evolution. Their table of studies contains one inorganic example, referencing, “Spontaneous formation of autocatalytic sets with self-replicating inorganic metal oxide clusters.” (2020)
So are there indeed chemical systems in the laboratory undergoing meaningful Darwinian evolution? I can’t say: my physics and chemistry education stopped at the high school level. I can’t tell what is and moreover is not being demonstrated in these papers. That said, chemical reactions that are somewhat short of full blown and sustained Darwinian competition should intrigue those interested in the chemistry of the oceans of Europa and Enceladus, the lakes of Titan, and the clouds of Jupiter. Not that I’ve ruled out even multi-cellular life in any of those locations.
1 Framework originally from The Units of Selection (1970) and Conditions for evolution by natural selection (2007)
Well… it’s not yet proven impossible that the weak force can influence molecular chirality. There are some hints that it could under some circumstances. I think it’s an unlikely cause, but not completely impossible. Of course, you’re right that the linked paper is about how an early coinflip could have influenced later choices in chirality. But perhaps that early coinflip had its own bias.
When it comes to chemical systems, there is a duality at play in earthbound life systems.
We often focus on the coding - the RNA/DNA strands - but forget a critical counterpart : the ribosome.
No ribosome, no functioning cell, and no RNA/DNA being passed on. Virons are nothing without the ribosomes of the host. They don’t code for a ribosome, so cannot reproduce in any manner without a host that contains ribosomes, and that host needs to code for the production of ribosomes in order to function.
Then we need to worry about the cellular machinery that supports reproduction. Just worry about reproducing the basic coding. When it comes to the reproducing part, we have meiosis, mitosis, and for non-eukaryotic cells, various more primitive fission processes still mediated by specific proteins. We can reasonably assume that a pre-condition for even the most primitive evolving life (as we know it) is that there is coding for the needed proteins to mediate fission, (or possibly a primitive single stranded duplication) as part of the reproducing code.
So, there is going to be a form of symbiotic co-evolution. Somewhere where the energetic regime is favourable along with a lot of useful building blocks swimming about one might assume that a pairing of a proto-gene and a simple protein that just slightly favoured a reaction that walked the code and spat out the same protein, or one that was near enough. And that protein returned the favour by aiding a reaction that reproduced the code chain.
Getting here is the big leap. But it needn’t have anything like the sophistication we see in modern systems. Error correction is a luxury. Just a general tendency for fidelity will be enough. The reaction won’t be competing with anything else, and has millions of years to chug along. But once there is an even basic system that has a better than even chance of crawling against the forces of entropy, it will begin to evolve. All we need.
What this might have looked like in detail is probably forever lost to time. Even slightly modern systems almost certainly will have out competed it in every possible niche. But the basics seem reasonable.
I often think we have a blinkered view about where the sophistication in life is. We thing of the sophistication in multicellular life and us critters. But there was a heck of a lot more time put into getting the basics of a single cell working before life moved on to more than one cell. There is extraordinary stuff in any cell, and we are probably still babes in the woods in our understanding of it.
Scientists have caught a once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event in progress, as two lifeforms have merged into one organism that boasts abilities its peers would envy. Last time this happened, Earth got plants.
https://newatlas.com/biology/life-merger-evolution-symbiosis-organelle/
Endosymbiosis is hardly a “once-in-a-billion-years evolutionary event”, and in fact it has likely occurred many times in evolutionary history but hasn’t resulted in obvious morphological changes that are as evident as mitochondria and chloroplasts.
Stranger