Inevitable Life?
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
| 2007 Public Lectures |
D. Eric Smith is Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and senior member of SFI’s Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research (FIBR) program supported
by the National Science Foundation.
Discussant: David Krakauer, Professor, Santa Fe Institute
Perhaps the most fundamental question of biology is why life exists on earth at all. How -- and more importantly why -- did it emerge, and how has it
managed to persist for almost four billion years in the face of constant shocks and perturbations? Many researchers have supposed that the emergence
of life hinged on a sequence of improbable events, at the same time as they have taken for granted the ability of life on earth to persist indefinitely and
to “freeze in” the consequences of early accidents. Smith argues that there is ample evidence for a different interpretation: the emergence of life was an
inevitable outcome of geochemistry on the early earth, and the same forces responsible for emergence have continued to support the persistence of life
ever since. Metabolism, in particular, preserves the oldest regularities of incipient life, and through these we can partly retrace the progression from the
geological to the living world.
Wednesday, April 18 at 7:30 pm
James A. Little Theater
New Mexico School for the Deaf
1060 Cerrillos Road, Santa Fe.