Sublime

assembly theory, a way of differentiating life from nonlife, not by its chemistry but by its complexity.

dead-ends in nature’s evolutionary exploration of novelty.

The way to proceed is clear: start with the minimal specification for a living, reproducing thing—a list of all the things it has to be able to do—and work backward, making an inventory of the available raw materials (often called the feedstock molecules of prebiotic chemistry), and asking what sequence of possible events could gradually bring toge

If research clearly shows that the effects of natural selection and random mutation are limited, why do so many smart scientists still hold that Darwinism is the major force behind the development of life?

Religions will no longer want to claim the design of the biosphere as one of the achievements of their deities, just as today they no longer bother to claim thunder.

Brenner was in a thoughtful mood, drinking sherry before dinner at King’s College. When he began working with Crick, less than two decades before, molecular biology did not even have a name. Two decades later, in the 1990s, scientists worldwide would undertake the mapping of the entire human genome: perhaps 20,000 genes, 3 billion base pairs. What

Komplexitätsforscher wie die Amerikaner David Depew und Bruce Weber nehmen an, dass die darwinistische Selektion nur einen Spezialfall eines viel umfassenderen Szenarios der Selbstorganisation darstellt. »Selbstorganisierende Systeme können überhaupt nur in begrenztem Maß durch Selektion beeinflusst werden«,

Can the emergent properties be deduced from the properties of the components?

These three research axes converge in one aim: contributing to actualizing the innovational potential of autopoietic biology, which is still far from being fully exploited by contemporary scientific and philosophical research.