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The Center for the Study of Origins Fall 2018 Symposium:

The Exploration of Life’s Origin from Antiquity to the Present

October 5-6, 2018 -Free and Open to the Public- Friday, October 5 Keynote Speaker: Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institute & George Mason University Topic: Chance, Necessity, and the Origins of Life 7PM , (SEEC C120*) CSO Intro: Carol Cleland, Director Light Refreshments to follow

Saturday, October 6 Artwork: Jenny Mottar Morning Session: Robert Pasnau (SEEC C120) 8:30-9:00 AM – Registration, Coffee, Bagels (Location TBA) 9:00-9:10 AM – Welcome (CSO Director, Carol Cleland) 9:10-10:00 AM – Jacqueline Vayntrub, Yale University: Creation Stories and Cosmic Bodies: and the Origins of Life 10:00-10:30 AM – Daniel Coren, University of Colorado Boulder: on Life and the Origins of Motion 10:30-10:50 AM – Coffee Break 10:50-11:40 AM – Jessica Riskin, Stanford University: Lamarck on the Origins of Life 11:40-12:10 AM – Perspective (Robert Pasnau, CU Dept. of ) *The Sustainability, Energy and 12:10AM – 2:00PM: Break for lunch the Environment Complex (SEEC) is located on the University of

Colorado Boulder East Campus Afternoon Session: Bruce Jakosky (SEEC C120) 2:00-2:30 PM – Veronica Vaida, University of Colorado Boulder: Sunlight fueled molecular complexity necessary for life 2:30-3:20 PM – Sheref Mansy, University of Trento: The emergence of iron-sulfur dependent metabolism 3:20-3:40 PM – Coffee Break (SEEC C120) 3:40-4:10 PM – Michael Yarus, University of Colorado Boulder: Emergence of an initial genetic system from established RNA reactions 4:10-4:40 PM – Perspective (Bruce Jakosky, CU Dept. of Geological Sciences and LASP) 4:40-5:10 PM – Discussion (Carol Cleland, CSO Director, CU Dept. of Philosophy)

1 The Exploration of Life’s Origin from Antiquity to the Present

The question of how life originated on Earth has fascinated human beings for more than two thousand years. The Center for the Study of Origin’s 2018 Fall Symposium explores the question of the origin of life from a multidisciplinary perspective. Invited speakers include a scholar of biblical studies (Jacqueline Vayntrub, Yale University) speaking on mythic stories of the origin of life from the ancient world, an historian of (Jessica Riskin, Stanford University) speaking Lamarck’s views on the origin of life, a geophysicist (Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institute of Technology) discussing whether the emergence of life on the early Earth from nonliving chemicals was a matter of chance or physical necessity, and a biochemist (Sheref Mansy, University of Trento, Italy) investigating early metabolic systems. Additional speakers from the University of Colorado Boulder include philosopher Daniel Coren speaking on Aristotle’s ideas of life and self-motion, physical chemist Veronica Vaida speaking on prebiotic sources for the earliest biological molecules, and biologist Michael Yarus discussing the emergence of an initial genetic system in the RNA world. The goal of this symposium is to explore scientific and philosophical challenges involved in investigating the origin of life on Earth, as well as how the pursuit of an understanding of the origin of life has permeated our culture in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

Speakers, Titles, and Abstracts

External Speakers:

Robert Hazen, Carnegie Institute of Technology and George Mason University, Washington DC

Chance, Necessity, and the Origins of Life

Earth’s 4.5 billion year is a complex tale of deterministic physical and chemical processes, as well as “frozen accidents.” This history is preserved most vividly in mineral species, as explored in new approaches called “mineral ” and “mineral .” We find that Earth's changing near-surface mineralogy reflects the co-evolving geosphere and biosphere in a variety of surprising ways that touch on life’s origins. Recent research adds two important insights to this discussion. First, chance versus necessity is an inherently false dichotomy—a range of probabilities exists for many natural events, including the chemical reactions leading to the origins of life. Second, given the astonishing combinatorial chemical richness of early Earth, key chemical steps in life’s origins that are unlikely to be reproduced at laboratory scales of time and space may, nevertheless, be deterministic at planetary scales over a billion years.

Sheref Mansy, University of Trento, Italy

The emergence of iron-sulfur dependent metabolism

Cells persist by balancing favorable chemistry with the thermodynamically unfavorable reactions that are needed to support the cell. In extant organisms, this balancing act is mediated in large part by iron-sulfur protein enzymes that work to place the energy released from the breakdown of foodstuff, i.e. catabolism, into a restricted set of common currencies, such as proton gradients. The energy stored in the proton gradients is then spent on energetically costly maintenance work, i.e. anabolism. Although this thermodynamic relationship is a universal feature of life, the complexity of extant metabolic systems makes it difficult to 2 understand how such systems could have come to play a central role in biology. We find that the chemistry that emerges from simple, prebiotically plausible mixtures of iron, sulfide, and short peptides naturally leads to the generation of a pH gradient across membranes of the same magnitude found in living cells. More specifically, these simple and abundant ingredients spontaneously form iron-sulfur peptides under conditions compatible with the surface of the early Earth. The iron-sulfur peptides are catalytically active, capable of the iterative transfer of electrons leading to the formation of a pH gradient in a manner similar to that found in biology. As proton gradients are completely conserved across all known living systems, iron-sulfur peptide chemistry may have played an early role in shaping the chemistry that became metabolism.

Jessica Riskin, Stanford University, USA

Lamarck on the Origins of Life

My subject is the emergence and spread, between about 1740 and 1820, of two major, related ideas: first, the idea of biology as a distinct science of life, and second, the idea of what we would now call “evolution,” but I will call it “transformism” to avoid reading aspects of later theories back into these early ideas about species-change. The person who chiefly pioneered both of these ideas was the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, author of the term “biology” and of the first theory of species-change and professor of at the Muséum national d’ in Paris. In 1802, Lamarck defined “biology” as one of three parts of “terrestrial ,” the part comprehending everything to do with living bodies. Living matter, he argued, was spontaneously generated from inanimate matter by the action of natural forces including electricity and magnetism. In living matter, a new force then took effect, a force of complexification that drove animate bodies to compose and transform their organization over time. These axioms - that living matter originated spontaneously from inanimate matter, then composed and transformed itself - were central to this original definition of “biology.” The paper will examine the political as well as intellectual history of these conjoined ideas - transformism and a science devoted to its study - which carried with them an atmosphere of materialism, radicalism and anti-clericalism. This atmosphere became especially troubling at key moments during the nineteenth century: under Napoleon, and later, to people such as the German Darwinist biologist August Weismann, who offered a definitive new interpretation of that eliminated any whiff of . Weismann and other neo-Darwinists were so successful that even today, Lamarck’s name is still in bad odor. His ideas in themselves cannot tell us why; only their complicated history can do that.

Jacqueline Vayntrub, Yale Divinity School, USA

Creation Stores and Cosmic Bodies: Ancient Literature and the Origins of Life

How was the cosmos and its creation imagined in antiquity? How was the human condition understood within its natural environment? In this lecture, I draw upon ancient Middle Eastern myth and biblical texts variously praising and lamenting the cosmos, cities, human bodies, gods, and monsters. Closely reading descriptions of these entities and their poetic arrangement, I outline an ancient anatomical understanding of human bodies. I show how biblical authors imagined the cosmos—its creation, its maintenance, and its future—on the analogy of the .

3 Internal Speakers:

Daniel Coren, Department of Philosophy, CU Boulder

Aristotle on Life and the Origins of Motion

Aristotle invented biology. In extant works such as his History of , we find the origins of the scientific study of life. As an enthusiastic biologist, he has systematic analyses of how animals behave and how they are structured. (His colleague, , took botany.) But Aristotle is better known as a philosopher. In his Physics and De Anima (“”), he is deeply interested in general accounts of life, motion, and change. In some cases, Aristotle uses his biology to help answer philosophical questions. One such question: Was there a beginning of motion? I’ll explain how Aristotle uses some of his observations about life and self-motion (motility) to argue that motion has a source but not a beginning.

Veronica Vaida, Department of Chemistry, CU Boulder

Sunlight fueled molecular complexity necessary for life

Origin of life scenarios require building complex, self-replicating organisms from simple organic precursors in the absence of the contemporary biological machinery while taking into account the fundamental geophysical constraints on early Earth. The coupled ocean-atmosphere system will be discussed as an environment for the emergence of life, emphasizing the emergence of complex structures at water interfaces by sunlight-fueled chemical processes. The air-water interfaces present on the surface of oceans, lakes, and atmospheric aerosols provide unique reactive environments. Atmospheric aerosols have been proposed as important prebiotic reactors as their life cycle allows for the transport and transfer of material between the ocean and the atmosphere and synthesis and folding of biopolymers into primitive enclosed structures.

Michael Yarus, Departments of Molecular, Cellular and , CU Boulder

Emergence of an initial genetic system from established RNA reactions

I describe, employing recently discovered, but now well-characterized, non-Watson Crick RNA synthesis (cross-templating), how one would quickly select inheritance of a new genetic capability (a new and useful chemical reaction). Selection for a purely chemical property, increased chemical output, readily causes the emergence of characteristic biotic properties, encoding and inheritance. The crucial notions are: if prebiotic ribonucleotides pool randomly in an uncontrolled early environment, such populations of pools evolve most rapidly when they are dispersed in product production (large standard deviation/mean), and are picked stringently (low fraction surviving selection). These conditions in turn favor templating (inheritance) because this evokes a simple kind of RNA catalysis of favored molecule synthesis (template catalysis). Moreover, primitive conditions virtually automatically create selections of precisely the optimal, fast-evolving type that we call starting bloc selections. In starting bloc selections, evolution chooses the earliest individuals to make a favorable product. For ribonucleotide reactions whose properties have been measured, emergence of genetic behavior by this route requires only millimolar 5’ ribonucleotides, and productive modification of the properties of a population can be completed in a few days at low temperature (ca. 10° C). Further, critical initial events are geochemically plausible and their descendants not only have not disappeared, but instead still flourish all around us in modern biology. Thus potentially, an early Earth had no genetic systems, then suddenly it did – and arguably, no outlandish reactants or means (beyond partially activated 5’ ribonucleotides) were required. 4