Getting beyond the toy domain: meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”
Name
life-10-00018.pdf
Size
227.32 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ca99f52cfad562c62b1a7d7b71c962ee
Author(s)
Bains, William
Date Issued
February 2020
Journal
Life
Publisher
MDPI
Citation
Bains, William, "Getting beyond the toy domain: meditations on David Deamer’s 'Assembling Life.'" Life 10, 12 (Feb. 2020): no. 18 doi 10.3390/life10020018 ©2020 Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
David Deamer has written another book, Assembling Life, on the origin of life. It is unapologetically polemic, presenting Deamer’s view that life originated in fresh water hydrothermal fields on volcanic islands on early Earth, arguing that this provided a unique environment not just for organic chemistry but for the self-assembling structure that drive that chemistry and form the basis of structure in life. It is worth reading, it is an advance in the field, but is it convincing? I argue that the Origin of Life field as a whole is unconvincing, generating results in Toy Domains that cannot be scaled to any real world scenario. I suggest that, by analogy with the history of artificial intelligence and solar astronomy, we need much more scale, and fundamentally new ideas, to take the field forward. Keywords: origin of life; hydrothermal; alkaline vent; Copernican principle; toy domain
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/life10020018
