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SUMMARY:Chance\, Necessity\, and Cause surrounding the Origin\, Evolution\
 , and Nature of Life - Eric Smith (Santa Fe Institute)
DTSTART:20260312T160000Z
DTEND:20260312T170000Z
UID:TALK245656@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Paul B. Rimmer
DESCRIPTION:(remote)\n\nBiology's roots in the description of diversity an
 d function have led to a fact-rich empirical understanding of life\, which
  unpacks to statistical reconstructions of Natural History and quite sophi
 sticated mechanistic analyses of structure and function in living systems.
   The Darwinian pivot\, from the previous pinnacle of Humboldtian naturali
 sm and explicitly contra Lamarck\, created\, from whole cloth\, a category
  of cause acting after the generation of change-events\, and parallel to i
 mpetus-related notions\, in which cause is the origin of change events\, t
 hat had been the basis of physical theorizing from John of Alexandria thro
 ugh Galileo and then Newton.  Darwinian ex-post causation through selectio
 n is a close cousin to notions of cause now extensively developed in infor
 mation theory\, which have also back-filled the modern physical theory of 
 matter via thermodynamic ideas.\n\nThe foregoing facts\, methods\, and con
 cepts\, as they have been used so far\, provide a partial window on the or
 igin of life and its major evolutionary patterns\, and an even less-comple
 te framing of the nature of the living state.  They have proved to be frus
 tratingly limiting\, however\, to address questions of the likelihood of l
 ife's emerging as a stage in planetary maturation\, of the chance or neces
 sity of any particular living feature\, and of the appropriate notion of c
 ause to account for life as a distinctive natural phenomenon.  An argument
  can be made that some of the ideas we need to better address these questi
 ons have been developed outside biology\, in areas of basic physics\, comp
 uter science\, control engineering\, and information theory\, where they c
 ould be discovered in simpler and more symmetric contexts (and even there\
 , slowly and painfully over more than a century!) and that we can now brin
 g them back into a unified science that includes questions of biological o
 rigin\, evolution\, and nature.\n\nMuch of my work has amounted to looking
  for small\, concrete questions about chance\, necessity\, and cause for d
 ifferent features of life\, in which I can give proofs-of-concept for fram
 ing the questions in terms of probability\, hardness or cost of search\, r
 obustness\, and related criteria\, and use combinatorial tools to propose 
 causal analyses.  I have looked at universal core metabolism through this 
 lens for some decades\, and recently turned to the origins of macromolecul
 es.  Tools include the statistical mechanics of stochastic population proc
 esses with stoichiometry (e.g. Chemical Reaction Networks) or generative c
 ombinatorial chemistries (e.g. graph grammars).  Other interests include b
 asic maths of likelihood in spaces of histories and events\, to understand
  how we should extend thermodynamic concepts\, and approaches such as Larg
 e Deviation Theory\, to the many contexts away from equilibrium where ener
 gy conservation may appear but need not be fundamental any longer.  Here t
 hermodynamics becomes recognizable as a theory about counting\, measuring\
 , and information -- albeit discovered and named for the effort to underst
 and heat-generated movement — but not fundamentally about\, or limited t
 o\, that phenomenal domain.\n\nAn overarching question is how we should re
 ason theoretically about complex phenomena in which causation is linked ac
 ross many scales\, in the early stages (where we still are) in which data 
 and essential concepts and insights are still fragmentary and too incomple
 te to assemble into any coherent worldview. 
LOCATION:Battcock\, Room F17
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