I have this suspicion after nibbling at the buffet of popular science literature for the last few decades about the origins of living things on this planet. Some of our modeling software and our algorithms may be the best models of what a biomolecular soup bathed in solar radiation or living on some temperature, pressure, and chemosynthetic gradient deep in the ocean may have produced. The short and skinny of it is that in the case of deep-sea vents, a continuous warm jet of chemicals was being belched from within the earth's mantle. Under the pressure of earth and the ocean, this hot jet churned the relatively cold water of the ocean, causing the kinds of heat and chemical dynamic mixtures that various mixing experiments on the street or at the lab bench could produce. Adding in the constant pull of a magnetic field the molecules forming in this churn have a chronic spooky action interface, which would tend to sort the kinds of molecules that form with a self-similar chronic feature of this interface: polarity. This 'chiral precondition' establishes a lingua franca for all consequent molecular bonding under the varying conditions inherent around these vents.
Now here's a complete pull-it-out-of-your-ass kind of assumption that as the various available chemicals churning from these vents over millions of years accumulated, so did the various chemical bonds made available. More specifically, the temperature gradient extending from the mouth of this undersea geyser to some theoretical outer space establishes the zones that favor certain kinds of molecules to form, reform, and proliferate, all using the concentration of specific molecules and temperatures as the catalyzing foreground for a semi-stable equilibrium. This creates a kind of layered onion, or in chemistry terms, a loosely colloidal sphere extending out from this deep-sea vent. At the limens of these discrete molecular regions interactions occur, causing novel pairings to 'precipitate out of solution.' What that suggests in this colloidal sphere model proposes that a kind of super-saturation of self-similar molecules were existing at different regions and that under the right bumping into the optimal companion molecules could create something novel and discreet against its environs, something which had a energy state that made it even more stable than that of its environs as well.
I'm drawn to a description of an experiment run by Michael Levin's lab with sort algorithms. In it his lab showed that when each number cell was assigned a specific sorting algorithm (n = 2), moments of clustering occurred among similar algorithms, all while still achieving the same result in the end: sortedness. What is the teleology of life? That life has a form, maintains order, and transcends to populations or communities of its kind points to some of this. But all of that rests upon some of the conditions set up in this theoretical chemistry experiment happening along the temperature gradient retreating from the deep-sea vent. My hasty conclusion will be that the energy costs of the sortedness of life are its delimiting feature, and that which essentially defines it. As we also know from grade school science the principle of the conservation of energy—nothing is lost; it simply changes form, dissipates out into the environment, or becomes a semi-stable, unreactive oxidated component clinging to the system. If energy is saved, why does it want to coalesce into the kinds of things that live, if only briefly among its kind, and pass back out into a local universe of possibilities?
These are hokey thought exercises. The writing is coarse and high-school level at best. But sometimes a feller just has to give things a think, and cobble together his prototype as kludgy as possible.
