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The origin of life

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Table Of Contents

Perhaps the most fundamental and at the same time the least understood biological problem is the origin of life. It is central to many scientific and philosophical problems and to any consideration of extraterrestrial life . Most of the hypotheses of the origin of life will fall into one of four categories:

The origin of life is a result of a supernatural event—that is, one irretrievably beyond the descriptive powers of physics , chemistry , and other science .
Life, particularly simple forms, spontaneously and readily arises from nonliving matter in short periods of time, today as in the past.
Life is coeternal with matter and has no beginning; life arrived on Earth at the time of Earth’s origin or shortly thereafter.
Life arose on the early Earth by a series of progressive chemical reactions . Such reactions may have been likely or may have required one or more highly improbable chemical events.

Hypothesis 1, the traditional contention of theology and some philosophy , is in its most general form not inconsistent with contemporary scientific knowledge, although scientific knowledge is inconsistent with a literal interpretation of the biblical accounts given in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis and in other religious writings. Hypothesis 2 (not of course inconsistent with 1) was the prevailing opinion for centuries. A typical 17th-century view follows:

[May one] doubt whether, in cheese and timber , worms are generated, or, if beetles and wasps, in cow’s dung, or if butterflies, locusts, shellfish , snails, eels, and suchlike be procreated of putrefied matter, which is apt to receive the form of that creature to which it is by the formative power disposed. To question this is to question reason , sense, and experience. If he doubts of this, let him go to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice begot of the mud of the Nylus [Nile], to the great calamity of the inhabitants. (Alexander Ross, Arcana Microcosmi , 1652.)

It was not until the Renaissance , with its burgeoning interest in anatomy , that such spontaneous generation of animals from putrefying matter was deemed impossible. During the mid-17th century the British physiologist William Harvey , in the course of his studies on the reproduction and development of the king’s deer , discovered that every animal comes from an egg . An Italian biologist, Francesco Redi , established in the latter part of the 17th century that the maggots in meat came from flies ’ eggs, deposited on the meat. In the 18th century an Italian priest, Lazzaro Spallanzani , showed that fertilization of eggs by sperm was necessary for the reproduction of mammals . Yet the idea of spontaneous generation died hard. Even though it was clear that large animals developed from fertile eggs, there was still hope that smaller beings, microorganisms, spontaneously generated from debris. Many felt it was obvious that the ubiquitous microscopic creatures generated continually from inorganic matter.

Maggots were prevented from developing on meat by covering it with a flyproof screen. Yet grape juice could not be kept from fermenting by putting over it any netting whatever. Spontaneous generation was the subject of a great controversy between the famous French bacteriologists Louis Pasteur and Félix-Archimède Pouchet in the 1850s. Pasteur triumphantly showed that even the most minute creatures came from “ germs ” that floated downward in the air , but that they could be impeded from access to foodstuffs by suitable filtration. Pouchet argued, defensibly, that life must somehow arise from nonliving matter; if not, how had life come about in the first place?

Pasteur’s experimental results were definitive: life does not spontaneously appear from nonliving matter. American historian James Strick reviewed the controversies of the late 19th century between evolutionists who supported the idea of “life from non-life” and their responses to Pasteur’s religious view that only the Deity can make life. The microbiological certainty that life always comes from preexisting life in the form of cells inhibited many post-Pasteur scientists from discussions of the origin of life at all. Many were, and still are, reluctant to offend religious sentiment by probing this provocative subject. But the legitimate issues of life’s origin and its relation to religious and scientific thought raised by Strick and other authors, such as the Australian Reg Morrison, persist today and will continue to engender debate .

Toward the end of the 19th century, hypothesis 3 gained currency. Swedish chemist Svante A. Arrhenius suggested that life on Earth arose from “panspermia,” microscopic spores that wafted through space from planet to planet or solar system to solar system by radiation pressure . This idea, of course, avoids rather than solves the problem of the origin of life. It seems extremely unlikely that any live organism could be transported to Earth over interplanetary or, worse yet , interstellar distances without being killed by the combined effects of cold, desiccation in a vacuum, and radiation .

Although English naturalist Charles Darwin did not commit himself on the origin of life, others subscribed to hypothesis 4 more resolutely. The famous British biologist T.H. Huxley in his book Protoplasm: The Physical Basis of Life (1869) and the British physicist John Tyndall in his “Belfast Address” of 1874 both asserted that life could be generated from inorganic chemicals. However, they had extremely vague ideas about how this might be accomplished. The very phrase “organic molecule” implied, especially then, a class of chemicals uniquely of biological origin. Despite the fact that urea and other organic ( carbon - hydrogen ) molecules had been routinely produced from inorganic chemicals since 1828, the term organic meant “from life” to many scientists and still does. In the following discussion the word organic implies no necessary biological origin. The origin-of-life problem largely reduces to determination of an organic, nonbiological source of certain processes such as the identity maintained by metabolism , growth , and reproduction (i.e., autopoiesis).

Darwin’s attitude was: “It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.” The two problems are in fact curiously connected. Indeed, modern astrophysicists do think about the origin of matter. The evidence is convincing that thermonuclear reactions , either in stellar interiors or in supernova explosions, generate all the chemical elements of the periodic table more massive than hydrogen and helium . Supernova explosions and stellar winds then distribute the elements into the interstellar medium , from which subsequent generations of stars and planets form. These thermonuclear processes are frequent and well-documented. Some thermonuclear reactions are more probable than others. These facts lead to the idea that a certain cosmic distribution of the major elements occurs throughout the universe . Some atoms of biological interest, their relative numerical abundances in the universe as a whole, on Earth, and in living organisms are listed in the table . Even though elemental composition varies from star to star, from place to place on Earth, and from organism to organism, these comparisons are instructive: the composition of life is intermediate between the average composition of the universe and the average composition of Earth. Ninety-nine percent of the mass both of the universe and of life is made of six atoms: hydrogen (H), helium (He), carbon (C), nitrogen (N), oxygen (O), and neon (Ne). Might not life on Earth have arisen when Earth’s chemical composition was closer to the average cosmic composition and before subsequent events changed Earth’s gross chemical composition?

Relative abundances of the elements (percent)
*0 percent here stands for any quantity less than 10 percent.
	universe	life (terrestrial vegetation)	(crust)
	87	16	3
	12	0*	0
	0.03	21	0.1
	0.008	3	0.0001
	0.06	59	49
	0.02	0	0
	0.0001	0.01	0.7
	0.0003	0.04	8
	0.0002	0.001	2
	0.003	0.1	14
	0.002	0.02	0.7
	0.00003	0.03	0.07
	0.000007	0.1	0.1
	0.0004	0	0
	0.0001	0.1	2
	0.002	0.005	18

The Jovian planets ( Jupiter , Saturn , Uranus , and Neptune ) are much closer to cosmic composition than is Earth. They are largely gaseous, with atmospheres composed principally of hydrogen and helium. Methane , ammonia , neon, and water have been detected in smaller quantities. This circumstance very strongly suggests that the massive Jovian planets formed from material of typical cosmic composition. Because they are so far from the Sun, their upper atmospheres are very cold. Atoms in the upper atmospheres of the massive, cold Jovian planets cannot now escape from their gravitational fields, and escape was probably difficult even during planetary formation .

Earth and the other planets of the inner solar system , however, are much less massive, and most have hotter upper atmospheres. Hydrogen and helium escape from Earth today; it may well have been possible for much heavier gases to have escaped during Earth’s formation. Very early in Earth’s history, there was a much larger abundance of hydrogen, which has subsequently been lost to space. Most likely the atoms carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen were present on the early Earth, not in the forms of CO 2 ( carbon dioxide ), N 2 , and O 2 as they are today but rather as their fully saturated hydrides: methane, ammonia, and water. The presence of large quantities of reduced (hydrogen-rich) minerals, such as uraninite and pyrite , that were exposed to the ancient atmosphere in sediments formed over two billion years ago implies that atmospheric conditions then were considerably less oxidizing than they are today.

In the 1920s British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane and Russian biochemist Aleksandr Oparin recognized that the nonbiological production of organic molecules in the present oxygen-rich atmosphere of Earth is highly unlikely but that, if Earth once had more hydrogen-rich conditions, the abiogenic production of organic molecules would have been much more likely. If large quantities of organic matter were somehow synthesized on early Earth, they would not necessarily have left much of a trace today. In the present atmosphere—with 21 percent of oxygen produced by cyanobacterial, algal, and plant photosynthesis—organic molecules would tend, over geological time, to be broken down and oxidized to carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water. As Darwin recognized, the earliest organisms would have tended to consume any organic matter spontaneously produced prior to the origin of life.

The first experimental simulation of early Earth conditions was carried out in 1953 by a graduate student, Stanley L . Miller , under the guidance of his professor at the University of Chicago , chemist Harold C. Urey . A mixture of methane, ammonia, water vapour, and hydrogen was circulated through a liquid solution and continuously sparked by a corona discharge mounted higher in the apparatus. The discharge was thought to represent lightning flashes. After several days of exposure to sparking, the solution changed colour. Several amino and hydroxy acids, familiar chemicals in contemporary Earth life, were produced by this simple procedure. The experiment is simple enough that the amino acids can readily be detected by paper chromatography by high school students. Ultraviolet light or heat was substituted as an energy source in subsequent experiments. The initial abundances of gases were altered. In many other experiments like this, amino acids were formed in large quantities. On the early Earth much more energy was available in ultraviolet light than from lightning discharges. At long ultraviolet wavelengths, methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen are all transparent, and much of the solar ultraviolet energy lies in this region of the spectrum. The gas hydrogen sulfide was suggested to be a likely compound relevant to ultraviolet absorption in Earth’s early atmosphere. Amino acids were also produced by long-wavelength ultraviolet irradiation of a mixture of methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen sulfide. At least some of these amino acid syntheses involved hydrogen cyanide and aldehydes (e.g., formaldehyde ) as gaseous intermediates formed from the initial gases. That amino acids, particularly biologically abundant amino acids, are made readily under simulated early Earth conditions is quite remarkable. If oxygen is permitted in these kinds of experiments, no amino acids are formed. This has led to a consensus that hydrogen-rich (or at least oxygen-poor) conditions were necessary for natural organic syntheses prior to the appearance of life.

Under alkaline conditions, and in the presence of inorganic catalysts , formaldehyde spontaneously reacts to form a variety of sugars . The five-carbon sugars fundamental to the formation of nucleic acids , as well as six-carbon sugars such as glucose and fructose , are easily produced. These are common metabolites and structural building blocks in life today. Furthermore, the nucleotide bases and even the biological pigments called porphyrins have been produced in the laboratory under simulated early Earth conditions. Both the details of the experimental synthetic pathways and the question of stability of the small organic molecules produced are vigorously debated. Nevertheless, most, if not all, of the essential building blocks of proteins (amino acids), carbohydrates (sugars), and nucleic acids (nucleotide bases)—that is, the monomers —can be readily produced under conditions thought to have prevailed on Earth in the Archean Eon . The search for the first steps in the origin of life has been transformed from a religious/philosophical exercise to an experimental science.

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How uchicago’s center for the study of gender and sexuality ‘is here for everyone’, the origin of life on earth, explained.

The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge on our planet? Because life arose in the largely unknown surface conditions of Earth’s early history, answering these and other questions remains a challenge.

Several seminal experiments in this topic have been conducted at the University of Chicago, including the Miller-Urey experiment that suggested how the building blocks of life could form in a primordial soup.

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When did life on Earth begin?

Where did life on Earth begin?

What are the ingredients of life on earth, what are the major scientific theories for how life emerged, what is chirality and why is it biologically important, what research are uchicago scientists currently conducting on the origins of life, when did life on earth begin .

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Scientists think that by 4.3 billion years ago, Earth may have developed conditions suitable to support life. The oldest known fossils, however, are only 3.7 billion years old. During that 600 million-year window, life may have emerged repeatedly, only to be snuffed out by catastrophic collisions with asteroids and comets.

The details of those early events are not well preserved in Earth’s oldest rocks. Some hints come from the oldest zircons, highly durable minerals that formed in magma. Scientists have found traces of a form of carbon—an important element in living organisms— in one such 4.1 billion-year-old zircon . However, it does not provide enough evidence to prove life’s existence at that early date.

Two possibilities are in volcanically active hydrothermal environments on land and at sea.

Some microorganisms thrive in the scalding, highly acidic hot springs environments like those found today in Iceland, Norway and Yellowstone National Park. The same goes for deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These chimney-like vents form where seawater comes into contact with magma on the ocean floor, resulting in streams of superheated plumes. The microorganisms that live near such plumes have led some scientists to suggest them as the birthplaces of Earth’s first life forms.

Organic molecules may also have formed in certain types of clay minerals that could have offered favorable conditions for protection and preservation. This could have happened on Earth during its early history, or on comets and asteroids that later brought them to Earth in collisions. This would suggest that the same process could have seeded life on planets elsewhere in the universe.

The recipe consists of a steady energy source, organic compounds and water.

Sunlight provides the energy source at the surface, which drives photosynthesis. On the ocean floor, geothermal energy supplies the chemical nutrients that organisms need to live.

Also crucial are the elements important to life . For us, these are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. But there are several scientific mysteries about how these elements wound up together on Earth. For example, scientists would not expect a planet that formed so close to the sun to naturally incorporate carbon and nitrogen. These elements become solid only under very cold temperatures, such as exist in the outer solar system, not nearer to the sun where Earth is. Also, carbon, like gold, is rare at the Earth’s surface. That’s because carbon chemically bonds more often with iron than rock. Gold also bonds more often with metal, so most of it ends up in the Earth’s core. So, how did the small amounts found at the surface get there? Could a similar process also have unfolded on other planets?

The last ingredient is water. Water now covers about 70% of Earth’s surface, but how much sat on the surface 4 billion years ago? Like carbon and nitrogen, water is much more likely to become a part of solid objects that formed at a greater distance from the sun. To explain its presence on Earth, one theory proposes that a class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites formed far enough from the sun to have served as a water-delivery system.

There are several theories for how life came to be on Earth. These include:

Life emerged from a primordial soup

As a University of Chicago graduate student in 1952, Stanley Miller performed a famous experiment with Harold Urey, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. Their results explored the idea that life formed in a primordial soup.

Miller and Urey injected ammonia, methane and water vapor into an enclosed glass container to simulate what were then believed to be the conditions of Earth’s early atmosphere. Then they passed electrical sparks through the container to simulate lightning. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, soon formed. Miller and Urey realized that this process could have paved the way for the molecules needed to produce life.

Scientists now believe that Earth’s early atmosphere had a different chemical makeup from Miller and Urey’s recipe. Even so, the experiment gave rise to a new scientific field called prebiotic or abiotic chemistry, the chemistry that preceded the origin of life. This is the opposite of biogenesis, the idea that only a living organism can beget another living organism.

Seeded by comets or meteors

Some scientists think that some of the molecules important to life may be produced outside the Earth. Instead, they suggest that these ingredients came from meteorites or comets.

“A colleague once told me, ‘It’s a lot easier to build a house out of Legos when they’re falling from the sky,’” said Fred Ciesla, a geophysical sciences professor at UChicago. Ciesla and that colleague, Scott Sandford of the NASA Ames Research Center, published research showing that complex organic compounds were readily produced under conditions that likely prevailed in the early solar system when many meteorites formed.

Meteorites then might have served as the cosmic Mayflowers that transported molecular seeds to Earth. In 1969, the Murchison meteorite that fell in Australia contained dozens of different amino acids—the building blocks of life.

Comets may also have offered a ride to Earth-bound hitchhiking molecules, according to experimental results published in 2001 by a team of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By showing that amino acids could survive a fiery comet collision with Earth, the team bolstered the idea that life’s raw materials came from space.

In 2019, a team of researchers in France and Italy reported finding extraterrestrial organic material preserved in the 3.3 billion-year-old sediments of Barberton, South Africa. The team suggested micrometeorites as the material’s likely source. Further such evidence came in 2022 from samples of asteroid Ryugu returned to Earth by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. The count of amino acids found in the Ryugu samples now exceeds 20 different types .

In 1953, UChicago researchers published a landmark paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry that marked the discovery of the pro-chirality concept , which pervades modern chemistry and biology. The paper described an experiment showing that the chirality of molecules—or “handedness,” much the way the right and left hands differ from one another—drives all life processes. Without chirality, large biological molecules such as proteins would be unable to form structures that could be reproduced.

Today, research on the origin of life at UChicago is expanding. As scientists have been able to find more and more exoplanets—that is, planets around stars elsewhere in the galaxy—the question of what the essential ingredients for life are and how to look for signs of them has heated up.

Nobel laureate Jack Szostak joined the UChicago faculty as University Professor in Chemistry in 2022 and will lead the University’s new interdisciplinary Origins of Life Initiative to coordinate research efforts into the origin of life on Earth. Scientists from several departments of the Physical Sciences Division are joining the initiative, including specialists in chemistry, astronomy, geology and geophysics.

“Right now we are getting truly unprecedented amounts of data coming in: Missions like Hayabusa and OSIRIS-REx are bringing us pieces of asteroids, which helps us understand the conditions that form planets, and NASA’s new JWST telescope is taking astounding data on the solar system and the planets around us ,” said Prof. Ciesla. “I think we’re going to make huge progress on this question.”

Last updated Sept. 19, 2022.

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How we will discover the mysterious origins of life once and for all

Seventy years ago, three discoveries propelled our understanding of how life on Earth began. But has the biggest clue to life's origins been staring biologists in the face all along?

By Michael Marshall

30 October 2023

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HOW did life on Earth begin? Until 70 years ago, generations of scientists had failed to throw much light on biology’s murky beginnings. But then came three crucial findings in quick succession.

In April 1953, the race to uncover the structure of DNA reached its climax. Geneticists soon realised that its double helix form could help explain how life replicates itself – a fundamental property thought to have appeared at or around the origin of life. Just three weeks later, news broke of the astonishing Miller-Urey experiment, which showed how a simple cocktail of chemicals could spontaneously generate amino acids, vital for building the molecules of life. Finally, in September 1953, we gained our first accurate estimate for the age of Earth, giving us a clearer idea of exactly how old life might be.

At that point, we seemed poised to finally understand life’s origins. Today, conclusive answers remain elusive. But the past few years have brought real signs of progress.

For instance, we have found that life’s ability to replicate is not wholly reliant on DNA. We also have a far better idea of the conditions on early Earth when life first appeared – and we are beginning to conduct experiments into how it emerged that are much more sophisticated than Miller-Urey.

A radical new theory rewrites the story of how life on Earth began

It has long been thought that the ingredients for life came together slowly, bit by bit. Now there is evidence it all happened at once in a chemical big bang

So, 70 years on from that incredible year of breakthroughs, how has our picture of life’s…

Article amended on 3 November 2023

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How Did Life Begin?

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Jack Szostak is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Is the existence of life on Earth a lucky fluke or an inevitable consequence of the laws of nature? Is it simple for life to emerge on a newly formed planet, or is it the virtually impossible product of a long series of unlikely events? Advances in fields as disparate as astronomy, planetary science and chemistry now hold promise that answers to such profound questions may be around the corner. If life turns out to have emerged multiple times in our galaxy, as scientists are hoping to discover, the path to it cannot be so hard. Moreover, if the route from chemistry to biology proves simple to traverse, the universe could be teeming with life.

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets has sparked a renaissance in origin-of-life studies. In a stunning surprise, almost all the newly discovered solar systems look very different from our own. Does that mean something about our own, very odd, system favors the emergence of life? Detecting signs of life on a planet orbiting a distant star is not going to be easy, but the technology for teasing out subtle “biosignatures” is developing so rapidly that with luck we may see distant life within one or two decades.

Innovations In The Biggest Questions In Science

To understand how life might begin, we first have to figure out how—and with what ingredients—planets form. A new generation of radio telescopes, notably the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile’s Atacama Desert, has provided beautiful images of protoplanetary disks and maps of their chemical composition. This information is inspiring better models of how planets assemble from the dust and gases of a disk. Within our own solar system, the Rosetta mission has visited a comet, and OSIRIS-REx will visit, and even try to return samples from, an asteroid, which might give us the essential inventory of the materials that came together in our planet.

Once a planet like our Earth—not too hot and not too cold, not too dry and not too wet—has formed, what chemistry must develop to yield the building blocks of life? In the 1950s the iconic Miller-Urey experiment, which zapped a mixture of water and simple chemicals with electric pulses (to simulate the impact of lightning), demonstrated that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are easy to make. Other molecules of life turned out to be harder to synthesize, however, and it is now apparent that we need to completely reimagine the path from chemistry to life. The central reason hinges on the versatility of RNA, a very long molecule that plays a multitude of essential roles in all existing forms of life. RNA can not only act like an enzyme, it can also store and transmit information. Remarkably, all the protein in all organisms is made by the catalytic activity of the RNA component of the ribosome, the cellular machine that reads genetic information and makes protein molecules. This observation suggests that RNA dominated an early stage in the evolution of life.

Today the question of how chemistry on the infant Earth gave rise to RNA and to RNA-based cells is the central question of origin-of-life research. Some scientists think that life originally used simpler molecules and only later evolved RNA. Other researchers, however, are tackling the origin of RNA head-on, and exciting new ideas are revolutionizing this once quiet backwater of chemical research. Favored geochemical scenarios involve volcanic regions or impact craters, with complex organic chemistry, multiple sources of energy, and dynamic light-dark, hot-cold and wet-dry cycles. Strikingly, many of the chemical intermediates on the way to RNA crystallize out of reaction mixtures, self-purifying and potentially accumulating on the early Earth as organic minerals—reservoirs of material waiting to come to life when conditions change.

Assuming that key problem is solved, we will still need to understand how RNA was replicated within the first primitive cells. Researchers are just beginning to identify the sources of chemical energy that could enable the RNA to copy itself, but much remains to be done. If these hurdles can also be overcome, we may be able to build replicating, evolving RNA-based cells in the laboratory—recapitulating a possible route to the origin of life.

What next? Chemists are already asking whether our kind of life can be generated only through a single plausible pathway or whether multiple routes might lead from simple chemistry to RNA-based life and on to modern biology. Others are exploring variations on the chemistry of life, seeking clues as to the possible diversity of life “out there” in the universe. If all goes well, we will eventually learn how robust the transition from chemistry to biology is and therefore whether the universe is full of life-forms or—but for us—sterile.

Illustration by Matthew Twombly

Nature 557 , S13-S15 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05098-w

This article is part of Innovations In The Biggest Questions In Science , an editorially independent supplement produced with the financial support of third parties. About this content .

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June 1, 2018

How Did Life Begin?

Untangling the origins of organisms will require experiments at the tiniest scales and observations at the vastest

By Jack Szostak

To understand how life might begin, we first have to figure out how—and with what ingredients—planets form. A new generation of radio telescopes, notably the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile’s Atacama Desert, has provided beautiful images of protoplanetary disks and maps of their chemical composition. This information is inspiring better models of how planets assemble from the dust and gases of a disk. Within our own solar system, the Rosetta mission has visited a comet, and OSIRIS-REx is on its way back to Earth with samples from an asteroid, which might give us the essential inventory of the materials that came together in our planet.

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Once a planet like our Earth—not too hot and not too cold, not too dry and not too wet—has formed, what chemistry must develop to yield the building blocks of life? In the 1950s the iconic Miller-Urey experiment, which zapped a mixture of water and simple chemicals with electric pulses (to simulate the impact of lightning), demonstrated that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are easy to make. Other molecules of life turned out to be harder to synthesize, however, and it is now apparent that we need to completely reimagine the path from chemistry to life. The central reason hinges on the versatility of RNA, a very long molecule that plays a multitude of essential roles in all existing forms of life. RNA can not only act like an enzyme but also store and transmit information. Remarkably, all the protein in all organisms is made by the catalytic activity of the RNA component of the ribosome, the cellular machine that reads genetic information and makes protein molecules. This observation suggests that RNA dominated an early stage in the evolution of life.

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From soup to cells: The origin of life

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Studying the origin of life

The origin of life might seem like the ultimate cold case: no one was there to observe it and much of the relevant evidence has been lost in the intervening 3.5 billion years or so. Nonetheless, many separate lines of evidence do shed light on this event, and as biologists continue to investigate these data, they are slowly piecing together a picture of how life originated. Major lines of evidence include DNA, biochemistry, and experiments.

Origins and DNA evidence

Biologists use the DNA sequences of modern organisms to reconstruct the tree of life and to figure out the likely characteristics of the most recent common ancestor of all living things — the “trunk” of the tree of life. In fact, according to some hypotheses, this “most recent common ancestor” may actually be a set of organisms that lived at the same time and were able to swap genes easily. In either case, reconstructing the early branches on the tree of life tells us that this ancestor (or set of ancestors) probably used DNA as its genetic material and performed complex chemical reactions. But what came before it? We know that this last common ancestor must have had ancestors of its own – a long line of forebears forming the root of the tree of life – but to learn about them, we must turn to other lines of evidence.

How did life originate?

Origins and biochemical evidence

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7 theories on the origin of life

The answer to the origin of life remains unknown, but here are scientists best bets

The origin of life might be discovered by looking into our DNA

An electric spark

Molecules of life met on clay

Deep-sea vents
Born from ice
Understanding DNA
Simple beginnings
Life came from space

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The origin of life on Earth began more than 3 billion years ago, evolving from the most basic of microbes into a dazzling array of complexity over time. But how did the first organisms on the only known home to life in the universe develop from the primordial soup?

Science remains undecided and conflicted as to the exact origin of life, also known as abiogenesis. Even the very definition of life is contested and rewritten, with one study published in the J ournal of Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics , suggesting uncovering 123 different published definitions.

Although science still seems unsure, here are some of the many different scientific theories on the origin of life on Earth.

It started with an electric spark

Lightning may have provided the spark needed for life to begin.Electric sparks can generate amino acids and sugars from an atmosphere loaded with water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen , as was shown in the famous Miller-Urey experiment in 1952, according to Scientific American . The experiment's findings suggested that lightning might have helped create the key building blocks of life on Earth in its early days. Over millions of years, larger and more complex molecules could form.

Although research since then has revealed the early atmosphere of Earth was actually hydrogen-poor, scientists have suggested that volcanic clouds in the early atmosphere might have held methane, ammonia and hydrogen and been filled with lightning as well, according to the University of California

The first molecules of life might have met on clay, according to an idea elaborated by organic chemist Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. Cairns-Smith proposed in his 1985 controversial book “ Seven Clues to the Origin of Life'' , that clay crystals preserve their structure as they grow and stick together to form areas exposed to different environments and trap other molecules along the way and organise them into patterns much like our genes do now.

– What is the difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells?

– What is biology?

– What are bacteria?

– What is an amoeba?

– Is there water on Mars?

The main role of DNA is to store information on how other molecules should be arranged. Genetic sequences in DNA are essentially instructions on how amino acids should be arranged in proteins. Cairns-Smith suggests that mineral crystals in clay could have arranged organic molecules into organized patterns. After a while, organic molecules took over this job and organized themselves.

Although Cairns-Smith's theory certainly gave scientists food for thought in the 1980s, it has still not been widely accepted by the scientific community.

Life began at deep-sea vents

A deep-sea vent releasing fluid into the water

The deep-sea vent theory suggests that life may have begun at submarine hydrothermal vents spewing elements key to life, such as carbon and hydrogen-, according to the journal Nature Reviews Microbiology .

Hydrothermal vents can be found in the darkest depths of the ocean floors, typically on diverging continental plates, according to the Natural History Museum . These vents erupt fluid which is superheated by the Earth’s core as it passes up through the crust, before being ejected at the vets. During its journey through the crust it collects dissolved gases and minerals, such as carbon and hydrogen.

Their rocky nooks could then have concentrated these molecules together and provided mineral catalysts for critical reactions. Even now, these vents, rich in chemical and thermal energy, sustain vibrant ecosystems.

Abiogenesis by way of hydrothermal vents continues to be investigated as a plausible cause of life on Earth. In 2019, scientists at University College London , successfully created protocells (non-living structures that help scientists understand the origins of life) under similar hot, alkaline environmental conditions to hydrothermal vents.

Life had a chilly start

Ice might have covered the oceans 3 billion years ago and facilitated the birth of life. "Key organic compounds thought to be important in the origin of life are more stable at lower temperatures,” Jeffrey Bada at the University of California, told New Scientist . At normal temperatures these compounds, such as simple sets of amino acids, are sparsely populated in water, but when frozen become concentrated and facilitate the emergence of life, according to Bada’s work published in the journal I carus .

Ice also might have protected fragile organic compounds in the water below from ultraviolet light and destruction from cosmic impacts. The cold might have also helped these molecules to survive longer, enabling key reactions to happen.

The answer lies in understanding DNA formation

Nowadays DNA needs proteins in order to form, and proteins require DNA to form, so how could these have formed without each other? The answer may be RNA , which can store information like DNA, serve as an enzyme like proteins, and help create both DNA and proteins, according to the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell . Later DNA and proteins succeeded this "RNA world," because they are more efficient.

RNA still exists and performs several functions in organisms, including acting as an on-off switch for some genes. The question still remains how RNA got here in the first place. Some scientists think the molecule could have spontaneously arisen on Earth, while others say that was very unlikely to have happened.

Life had simple beginnings

Instead of developing from complex molecules such as RNA, life might have begun with smaller molecules interacting with each other in cycles of reactions. These might have been contained in simple capsules akin to cell membranes, and over time more complex molecules that performed these reactions better than the smaller ones could have evolved, scenarios dubbed "metabolism-first" models, as opposed to the "gene-first" model of the "RNA world" hypothesis.

Life was brought here from elsewhere in space

An illustration of an asteroid heading for Earth

Perhaps life did not begin on Earth at all, but was brought here from elsewhere in space, a notion known as panspermia, according to NASA . For instance, rocks regularly get blasted off Mars by cosmic impacts, and a number of Martian meteorites have been found on Earth that some researchers have controversially suggested brought microbes over here, potentially making us all Martians originally. Other scientists have even suggested that life might have hitchhiked on comets from other star systems. However, even if this concept were true, the question of how life began on Earth would then only change to how life began elsewhere in space.

For more information into the theories of life’s origins check out “ The Stairway To Life: An Origin-Of-Life Reality Check ” by Change Laura Tan and “ The Mystery of Life's Origin ” by Charles B. Thaxton, et al.

Matthew Levy et al, “Prebiotic Synthesis of Adenine and Amino Acids Under Europa-like Conditions”, Icarus, Volume 145, June 2000, https://doi.org/10.1006/icar.2000.6365

William Martin, “Hydrothermal vents and the origin of life”, Nature Reviews Microbiology, Volume 6, September 2008, https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro1991

K. A. Dill and L. Agozzino, “Driving forces in the origins of life”, Open biology, Volume 11, February 2021, ttps://doi.org/10.1098/rsob.200324

Ben K. D. Pearce et al, “Origin of the RNA world: The fate of nucleobases in warm little ponds”, PNAS, Volume 114, October 2017, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1710339114

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The Meaning of Life

Many major historical figures in philosophy have provided an answer to the question of what, if anything, makes life meaningful, although they typically have not put it in these terms (with such talk having arisen only in the past 250 years or so, on which see Landau 1997). Consider, for instance, Aristotle on the human function, Aquinas on the beatific vision, and Kant on the highest good. Relatedly, think about Koheleth, the presumed author of the Biblical book Ecclesiastes, describing life as “futility” and akin to “the pursuit of wind,” Nietzsche on nihilism, as well as Schopenhauer when he remarks that whenever we reach a goal we have longed for we discover “how vain and empty it is.” While these concepts have some bearing on happiness and virtue (and their opposites), they are straightforwardly construed (roughly) as accounts of which highly ranked purposes a person ought to realize that would make her life significant (if any would).

Despite the venerable pedigree, it is only since the 1980s or so that a distinct field of the meaning of life has been established in Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy, on which this survey focuses, and it is only in the past 20 years that debate with real depth and intricacy has appeared. Two decades ago analytic reflection on life’s meaning was described as a “backwater” compared to that on well-being or good character, and it was possible to cite nearly all the literature in a given critical discussion of the field (Metz 2002). Neither is true any longer. Anglo-American-Australasian philosophy of life’s meaning has become vibrant, such that there is now way too much literature to be able to cite comprehensively in this survey. To obtain focus, it tends to discuss books, influential essays, and more recent works, and it leaves aside contributions from other philosophical traditions (such as the Continental or African) and from non-philosophical fields (e.g., psychology or literature). This survey’s central aim is to acquaint the reader with current analytic approaches to life’s meaning, sketching major debates and pointing out neglected topics that merit further consideration.

When the topic of the meaning of life comes up, people tend to pose one of three questions: “What are you talking about?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, and “Is life in fact meaningful?”. The literature on life's meaning composed by those working in the analytic tradition (on which this entry focuses) can be usefully organized according to which question it seeks to answer. This survey starts off with recent work that addresses the first, abstract (or “meta”) question regarding the sense of talk of “life’s meaning,” i.e., that aims to clarify what we have in mind when inquiring into the meaning of life (section 1). Afterward, it considers texts that provide answers to the more substantive question about the nature of meaningfulness (sections 2–3). There is in the making a sub-field of applied meaning that parallels applied ethics, in which meaningfulness is considered in the context of particular cases or specific themes. Examples include downshifting (Levy 2005), implementing genetic enhancements (Agar 2013), making achievements (Bradford 2015), getting an education (Schinkel et al. 2015), interacting with research participants (Olson 2016), automating labor (Danaher 2017), and creating children (Ferracioli 2018). In contrast, this survey focuses nearly exclusively on contemporary normative-theoretical approaches to life’s meanining, that is, attempts to capture in a single, general principle all the variegated conditions that could confer meaning on life. Finally, this survey examines fresh arguments for the nihilist view that the conditions necessary for a meaningful life do not obtain for any of us, i.e., that all our lives are meaningless (section 4).

1. The Meaning of “Meaning”

2.1. god-centered views, 2.2. soul-centered views, 3.1. subjectivism, 3.2. objectivism, 3.3. rejecting god and a soul, 4. nihilism, works cited, classic works, collections, books for the general reader, other internet resources, related entries.

One of the field's aims consists of the systematic attempt to identify what people (essentially or characteristically) have in mind when they think about the topic of life’s meaning. For many in the field, terms such as “importance” and “significance” are synonyms of “meaningfulness” and so are insufficiently revealing, but there are those who draw a distinction between meaningfulness and significance (Singer 1996, 112–18; Belliotti 2019, 145–50, 186). There is also debate about how the concept of a meaningless life relates to the ideas of a life that is absurd (Nagel 1970, 1986, 214–23; Feinberg 1980; Belliotti 2019), futile (Trisel 2002), and not worth living (Landau 2017, 12–15; Matheson 2017).

A useful way to begin to get clear about what thinking about life’s meaning involves is to specify the bearer. Which life does the inquirer have in mind? A standard distinction to draw is between the meaning “in” life, where a human person is what can exhibit meaning, and the meaning “of” life in a narrow sense, where the human species as a whole is what can be meaningful or not. There has also been a bit of recent consideration of whether animals or human infants can have meaning in their lives, with most rejecting that possibility (e.g., Wong 2008, 131, 147; Fischer 2019, 1–24), but a handful of others beginning to make a case for it (Purves and Delon 2018; Thomas 2018). Also under-explored is the issue of whether groups, such as a people or an organization, can be bearers of meaning, and, if so, under what conditions.

Most analytic philosophers have been interested in meaning in life, that is, in the meaningfulness that a person’s life could exhibit, with comparatively few these days addressing the meaning of life in the narrow sense. Even those who believe that God is or would be central to life’s meaning have lately addressed how an individual’s life might be meaningful in virtue of God more often than how the human race might be. Although some have argued that the meaningfulness of human life as such merits inquiry to no less a degree (if not more) than the meaning in a life (Seachris 2013; Tartaglia 2015; cf. Trisel 2016), a large majority of the field has instead been interested in whether their lives as individual persons (and the lives of those they care about) are meaningful and how they could become more so.

Focusing on meaning in life, it is quite common to maintain that it is conceptually something good for its own sake or, relatedly, something that provides a basic reason for action (on which see Visak 2017). There are a few who have recently suggested otherwise, maintaining that there can be neutral or even undesirable kinds of meaning in a person’s life (e.g., Mawson 2016, 90, 193; Thomas 2018, 291, 294). However, these are outliers, with most analytic philosophers, and presumably laypeople, instead wanting to know when an individual’s life exhibits a certain kind of final value (or non-instrumental reason for action).

Another claim about which there is substantial consensus is that meaningfulness is not all or nothing and instead comes in degrees, such that some periods of life are more meaningful than others and that some lives as a whole are more meaningful than others. Note that one can coherently hold the view that some people’s lives are less meaningful (or even in a certain sense less “important”) than others, or are even meaningless (unimportant), and still maintain that people have an equal standing from a moral point of view. Consider a consequentialist moral principle according to which each individual counts for one in virtue of having a capacity for a meaningful life, or a Kantian approach according to which all people have a dignity in virtue of their capacity for autonomous decision-making, where meaning is a function of the exercise of this capacity. For both moral outlooks, we could be required to help people with relatively meaningless lives.

Yet another relatively uncontroversial element of the concept of meaningfulness in respect of individual persons is that it is logically distinct from happiness or rightness (emphasized in Wolf 2010, 2016). First, to ask whether someone’s life is meaningful is not one and the same as asking whether her life is pleasant or she is subjectively well off. A life in an experience machine or virtual reality device would surely be a happy one, but very few take it to be a prima facie candidate for meaningfulness (Nozick 1974: 42–45). Indeed, a number would say that one’s life logically could become meaningful precisely by sacrificing one’s well-being, e.g., by helping others at the expense of one’s self-interest. Second, asking whether a person’s existence over time is meaningful is not identical to considering whether she has been morally upright; there are intuitively ways to enhance meaning that have nothing to do with right action or moral virtue, such as making a scientific discovery or becoming an excellent dancer. Now, one might argue that a life would be meaningless if, or even because, it were unhappy or immoral, but that would be to posit a synthetic, substantive relationship between the concepts, far from indicating that speaking of “meaningfulness” is analytically a matter of connoting ideas regarding happiness or rightness. The question of what (if anything) makes a person’s life meaningful is conceptually distinct from the questions of what makes a life happy or moral, although it could turn out that the best answer to the former question appeals to an answer to one of the latter questions.

Supposing, then, that talk of “meaning in life” connotes something good for its own sake that can come in degrees and that is not analytically equivalent to happiness or rightness, what else does it involve? What more can we say about this final value, by definition? Most contemporary analytic philosophers would say that the relevant value is absent from spending time in an experience machine (but see Goetz 2012 for a different view) or living akin to Sisyphus, the mythic figure doomed by the Greek gods to roll a stone up a hill for eternity (famously discussed by Albert Camus and Taylor 1970). In addition, many would say that the relevant value is typified by the classic triad of “the good, the true, and the beautiful” (or would be under certain conditions). These terms are not to be taken literally, but instead are rough catchwords for beneficent relationships (love, collegiality, morality), intellectual reflection (wisdom, education, discoveries), and creativity (particularly the arts, but also potentially things like humor or gardening).

Pressing further, is there something that the values of the good, the true, the beautiful, and any other logically possible sources of meaning involve? There is as yet no consensus in the field. One salient view is that the concept of meaning in life is a cluster or amalgam of overlapping ideas, such as fulfilling higher-order purposes, meriting substantial esteem or admiration, having a noteworthy impact, transcending one’s animal nature, making sense, or exhibiting a compelling life-story (Markus 2003; Thomson 2003; Metz 2013, 24–35; Seachris 2013, 3–4; Mawson 2016). However, there are philosophers who maintain that something much more monistic is true of the concept, so that (nearly) all thought about meaningfulness in a person’s life is essentially about a single property. Suggestions include being devoted to or in awe of qualitatively superior goods (Taylor 1989, 3–24), transcending one’s limits (Levy 2005), or making a contribution (Martela 2016).

Recently there has been something of an “interpretive turn” in the field, one instance of which is the strong view that meaning-talk is logically about whether and how a life is intelligible within a wider frame of reference (Goldman 2018, 116–29; Seachris 2019; Thomas 2019; cf. Repp 2018). According to this approach, inquiring into life’s meaning is nothing other than seeking out sense-making information, perhaps a narrative about life or an explanation of its source and destiny. This analysis has the advantage of promising to unify a wide array of uses of the term “meaning.” However, it has the disadvantages of being unable to capture the intuitions that meaning in life is essentially good for its own sake (Landau 2017, 12–15), that it is not logically contradictory to maintain that an ineffable condition is what confers meaning on life (as per Cooper 2003, 126–42; Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014), and that often human actions themselves (as distinct from an interpretation of them), such as rescuing a child from a burning building, are what bear meaning.

Some thinkers have suggested that a complete analysis of the concept of life’s meaning should include what has been called “anti-matter” (Metz 2002, 805–07, 2013, 63–65, 71–73) or “anti-meaning” (Campbell and Nyholm 2015; Egerstrom 2015), conditions that reduce the meaningfulness of a life. The thought is that meaning is well represented by a bipolar scale, where there is a dimension of not merely positive conditions, but also negative ones. Gratuitous cruelty or destructiveness are prima facie candidates for actions that not merely fail to add meaning, but also subtract from any meaning one’s life might have had.

Despite the ongoing debates about how to analyze the concept of life’s meaning (or articulate the definition of the phrase “meaning in life”), the field remains in a good position to make progress on the other key questions posed above, viz., of what would make a life meaningful and whether any lives are in fact meaningful. A certain amount of common ground is provided by the point that meaningfulness at least involves a gradient final value in a person’s life that is conceptually distinct from happiness and rightness, with exemplars of it potentially being the good, the true, and the beautiful. The rest of this discussion addresses philosophical attempts to capture the nature of this value theoretically and to ascertain whether it exists in at least some of our lives.

2. Supernaturalism

Most analytic philosophers writing on meaning in life have been trying to develop and evaluate theories, i.e., fundamental and general principles, that are meant to capture all the particular ways that a life could obtain meaning. As in moral philosophy, there are recognizable “anti-theorists,” i.e., those who maintain that there is too much pluralism among meaning conditions to be able to unify them in the form of a principle (e.g., Kekes 2000; Hosseini 2015). Arguably, though, the systematic search for unity is too nascent to be able to draw a firm conclusion about whether it is available.

The theories are standardly divided on a metaphysical basis, that is, in terms of which kinds of properties are held to constitute the meaning. Supernaturalist theories are views according to which a spiritual realm is central to meaning in life. Most Western philosophers have conceived of the spiritual in terms of God or a soul as commonly understood in the Abrahamic faiths (but see Mulgan 2015 for discussion of meaning in the context of a God uninterested in us). In contrast, naturalist theories are views that the physical world as known particularly well by the scientific method is central to life’s meaning.

There is logical space for a non-naturalist theory, according to which central to meaning is an abstract property that is neither spiritual nor physical. However, only scant attention has been paid to this possibility in the recent Anglo-American-Australasian literature (Audi 2005).

It is important to note that supernaturalism, a claim that God (or a soul) would confer meaning on a life, is logically distinct from theism, the claim that God (or a soul) exists. Although most who hold supernaturalism also hold theism, one could accept the former without the latter (as Camus more or less did), committing one to the view that life is meaningless or at least lacks substantial meaning. Similarly, while most naturalists are atheists, it is not contradictory to maintain that God exists but has nothing to do with meaning in life or perhaps even detracts from it. Although these combinations of positions are logically possible, some of them might be substantively implausible. The field could benefit from discussion of the comparative attractiveness of various combinations of evaluative claims about what would make life meaningful and metaphysical claims about whether spiritual conditions exist.

Over the past 15 years or so, two different types of supernaturalism have become distinguished on a regular basis (Metz 2019). That is true not only in the literature on life’s meaning, but also in that on the related pro-theism/anti-theism debate, about whether it would be desirable for God or a soul to exist (e.g., Kahane 2011; Kraay 2018; Lougheed 2020). On the one hand, there is extreme supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for any meaning in life. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life is meaningless. On the other hand, there is moderate supernaturalism, according to which spiritual conditions are necessary for a great or ultimate meaning in life, although not meaning in life as such. If neither God nor a soul exists, then, by this view, everyone’s life could have some meaning, or even be meaningful, but no one’s life could exhibit the most desirable meaning. For a moderate supernaturalist, God or a soul would substantially enhance meaningfulness or be a major contributory condition for it.

There are a variety of ways that great or ultimate meaning has been described, sometimes quantitatively as “infinite” (Mawson 2016), qualitatively as “deeper” (Swinburne 2016), relationally as “unlimited” (Nozick 1981, 618–19; cf. Waghorn 2014), temporally as “eternal” (Cottingham 2016), and perspectivally as “from the point of view of the universe” (Benatar 2017). There has been no reflection as yet on the crucial question of how these distinctions might bear on each another, for instance, on whether some are more basic than others or some are more valuable than others.

Cross-cutting the extreme/moderate distinction is one between God-centered theories and soul-centered ones. According to the former, some kind of connection with God (understood to be a spiritual person who is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful and who is the ground of the physical universe) constitutes meaning in life, even if one lacks a soul (construed as an immortal, spiritual substance that contains one’s identity). In contrast, by the latter, having a soul and putting it into a certain state is what makes life meaningful, even if God does not exist. Many supernaturalists of course believe that God and a soul are jointly necessary for a (greatly) meaningful existence. However, the simpler view, that only one of them is necessary, is common, and sometimes arguments proffered for the complex view fail to support it any more than the simpler one.

The most influential God-based account of meaning in life has been the extreme view that one’s existence is significant if and only if one fulfills a purpose God has assigned. The familiar idea is that God has a plan for the universe and that one’s life is meaningful just to the degree that one helps God realize this plan, perhaps in a particular way that God wants one to do so. If a person failed to do what God intends her to do with her life (or if God does not even exist), then, on the current view, her life would be meaningless.

Thinkers differ over what it is about God’s purpose that might make it uniquely able to confer meaning on human lives, but the most influential argument has been that only God’s purpose could be the source of invariant moral rules (Davis 1987, 296, 304–05; Moreland 1987, 124–29; Craig 1994/2013, 161–67) or of objective values more generally (Cottingham 2005, 37–57), where a lack of such would render our lives nonsensical. According to this argument, lower goods such as animal pleasure or desire satisfaction could exist without God, but higher ones pertaining to meaning in life, particularly moral virtue, could not. However, critics point to many non-moral sources of meaning in life (e.g., Kekes 2000; Wolf 2010), with one arguing that a universal moral code is not necessary for meaning in life, even if, say, beneficent actions are (Ellin 1995, 327). In addition, there are a variety of naturalist and non-naturalist accounts of objective morality––and of value more generally––on offer these days, so that it is not clear that it must have a supernatural source in God’s will.

One recurrent objection to the idea that God’s purpose could make life meaningful is that if God had created us with a purpose in mind, then God would have degraded us and thereby undercut the possibility of us obtaining meaning from fulfilling the purpose. The objection harks back to Jean-Paul Sartre, but in the analytic literature it appears that Kurt Baier was the first to articulate it (1957/2000, 118–20; see also Murphy 1982, 14–15; Singer 1996, 29; Kahane 2011; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). Sometimes the concern is the threat of punishment God would make so that we do God’s bidding, while other times it is that the source of meaning would be constrictive and not up to us, and still other times it is that our dignity would be maligned simply by having been created with a certain end in mind (for some replies to such concerns, see Hanfling 1987, 45–46; Cottingham 2005, 37–57; Lougheed 2020, 111–21).

There is a different argument for an extreme God-based view that focuses less on God as purposive and more on God as infinite, unlimited, or ineffable, which Robert Nozick first articulated with care (Nozick 1981, 594–618; see also Bennett-Hunter 2014; Waghorn 2014). The core idea is that for a finite condition to be meaningful, it must obtain its meaning from another condition that has meaning. So, if one’s life is meaningful, it might be so in virtue of being married to a person, who is important. Being finite, the spouse must obtain his or her importance from elsewhere, perhaps from the sort of work he or she does. This work also must obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is meaningful, and so on. A regress on meaningful conditions is present, and the suggestion is that the regress can terminate only in something so all-encompassing that it need not (indeed, cannot) go beyond itself to obtain meaning from anything else. And that is God. The standard objection to this relational rationale is that a finite condition could be meaningful without obtaining its meaning from another meaningful condition. Perhaps it could be meaningful in itself, without being connected to something beyond it, or maybe it could obtain its meaning by being related to something else that is beautiful or otherwise valuable for its own sake but not meaningful (Nozick 1989, 167–68; Thomson 2003, 25–26, 48).

A serious concern for any extreme God-based view is the existence of apparent counterexamples. If we think of the stereotypical lives of Albert Einstein, Mother Teresa, and Pablo Picasso, they seem meaningful even if we suppose there is no all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good spiritual person who is the ground of the physical world (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 31–37, 49–50; Landau 2017). Even religiously inclined philosophers have found this hard to deny these days (Quinn 2000, 58; Audi 2005; Mawson 2016, 5; Williams 2020, 132–34).

Largely for that reason, contemporary supernaturalists have tended to opt for moderation, that is, to maintain that God would greatly enhance the meaning in our lives, even if some meaning would be possible in a world without God. One approach is to invoke the relational argument to show that God is necessary, not for any meaning whatsoever, but rather for an ultimate meaning. “Limited transcendence, the transcending of our limits so as to connect with a wider context of value which itself is limited, does give our lives meaning––but a limited one. We may thirst for more” (Nozick 1981, 618). Another angle is to appeal to playing a role in God’s plan, again to claim, not that it is essential for meaning as such, but rather for “a cosmic significance....intead of a significance very limited in time and space” (Swinburne 2016, 154; see also Quinn 2000; Cottingham 2016, 131). Another rationale is that by fulfilling God’s purpose, we would meaningfully please God, a perfect person, as well as be remembered favorably by God forever (Cottingham 2016, 135; Williams 2020, 21–22, 29, 101, 108). Still another argument is that only with God could the deepest desires of human nature be satisfied (e.g., Goetz 2012; Seachris 2013, 20; Cottingham 2016, 127, 136), even if more surface desires could be satisfied without God.

In reply to such rationales for a moderate supernaturalism, there has been the suggestion that it is precisely by virtue of being alone in the universe that our lives would be particularly significant; otherwise, God’s greatness would overshadow us (Kahane 2014). There has also been the response that, with the opportunity for greater meaning from God would also come that for greater anti-meaning, so that it is not clear that a world with God would offer a net gain in respect of meaning (Metz 2019, 34–35). For example, if pleasing God would greatly enhance meaning in our lives, then presumably displeasing God would greatly reduce it and to a comparable degree. In addition, there are arguments for extreme naturalism (or its “anti-theist” cousin) mentioned below (sub-section 3.3).

Notice that none of the above arguments for supernaturalism appeals to the prospect of eternal life (at least not explicitly). Arguments that do make such an appeal are soul-centered, holding that meaning in life mainly comes from having an immortal, spiritual substance that is contiguous with one’s body when it is alive and that will forever outlive its death. Some think of the afterlife in terms of one’s soul entering a transcendent, spiritual realm (Heaven), while others conceive of one’s soul getting reincarnated into another body on Earth. According to the extreme version, if one has a soul but fails to put it in the right state (or if one lacks a soul altogether), then one’s life is meaningless.

There are three prominent arguments for an extreme soul-based perspective. One argument, made famous by Leo Tolstoy, is the suggestion that for life to be meaningful something must be worth doing, that something is worth doing only if it will make a permanent difference to the world, and that making a permanent difference requires being immortal (see also Hanfling 1987, 22–24; Morris 1992, 26; Craig 1994). Critics most often appeal to counterexamples, suggesting for instance that it is surely worth your time and effort to help prevent people from suffering, even if you and they are mortal. Indeed, some have gone on the offensive and argued that helping people is worth the sacrifice only if and because they are mortal, for otherwise they could invariably be compensated in an afterlife (e.g., Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Another recent and interesting criticism is that the major motivations for the claim that nothing matters now if one day it will end are incoherent (Greene 2021).

A second argument for the view that life would be meaningless without a soul is that it is necessary for justice to be done, which, in turn, is necessary for a meaningful life. Life seems nonsensical when the wicked flourish and the righteous suffer, at least supposing there is no other world in which these injustices will be rectified, whether by God or a Karmic force. Something like this argument can be found in Ecclesiastes, and it continues to be defended (e.g., Davis 1987; Craig 1994). However, even granting that an afterlife is required for perfectly just outcomes, it is far from obvious that an eternal afterlife is necessary for them, and, then, there is the suggestion that some lives, such as Mandela’s, have been meaningful precisely in virtue of encountering injustice and fighting it.

A third argument for thinking that having a soul is essential for any meaning is that it is required to have the sort of free will without which our lives would be meaningless. Immanuel Kant is known for having maintained that if we were merely physical beings, subjected to the laws of nature like everything else in the material world, then we could not act for moral reasons and hence would be unimportant. More recently, one theologian has eloquently put the point in religious terms: “The moral spirit finds the meaning of life in choice. It finds it in that which proceeds from man and remains with him as his inner essence rather than in the accidents of circumstances turns of external fortune....(W)henever a human being rubs the lamp of his moral conscience, a Spirit does appear. This Spirit is God....It is in the ‘Thou must’ of God and man’s ‘I can’ that the divine image of God in human life is contained” (Swenson 1949/2000, 27–28). Notice that, even if moral norms did not spring from God’s commands, the logic of the argument entails that one’s life could be meaningful, so long as one had the inherent ability to make the morally correct choice in any situation. That, in turn, arguably requires something non-physical about one’s self, so as to be able to overcome whichever physical laws and forces one might confront. The standard objection to this reasoning is to advance a compatibilism about having a determined physical nature and being able to act for moral reasons (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77). It is also worth wondering whether, if one had to have a spiritual essence in order to make free choices, it would have to be one that never perished.

Like God-centered theorists, many soul-centered theorists these days advance a moderate view, accepting that some meaning in life would be possible without immortality, but arguing that a much greater meaning would be possible with it. Granting that Einstein, Mandela, and Picasso had somewhat meaningful lives despite not having survived the deaths of their bodies (as per, e.g., Trisel 2004; Wolf 2015, 89–140; Landau 2017), there remains a powerful thought: more is better. If a finite life with the good, the true, and the beautiful has meaning in it to some degree, then surely it would have all the more meaning if it exhibited such higher values––including a relationship with God––for an eternity (Cottingham 2016, 132–35; Mawson 2016, 2019, 52–53; Williams 2020, 112–34; cf. Benatar 2017, 35–63). One objection to this reasoning is that the infinity of meaning that would be possible with a soul would be “too big,” rendering it difficult for the moderate supernaturalist to make sense of the intution that a finite life such as Einstein’s can indeed count as meaningful by comparison (Metz 2019, 30–31; cf. Mawson 2019, 53–54). More common, though, is the objection that an eternal life would include anti-meaning of various kinds, such as boredom and repetition, discussed below in the context of extreme naturalism (sub-section 3.3).

3. Naturalism

Recall that naturalism is the view that a physical life is central to life’s meaning, that even if there is no spiritual realm, a substantially meaningful life is possible. Like supernaturalism, contemporary naturalism admits of two distinguishable variants, moderate and extreme (Metz 2019). The moderate version is that, while a genuinely meaningful life could be had in a purely physical universe as known well by science, a somewhat more meaningful life would be possible if a spiritual realm also existed. God or a soul could enhance meaning in life, although they would not be major contributors. The extreme version of naturalism is the view that it would be better in respect of life’s meaning if there were no spiritual realm. From this perspective, God or a soul would be anti-matter, i.e., would detract from the meaning available to us, making a purely physical world (even if not this particular one) preferable.

Cross-cutting the moderate/extreme distinction is that between subjectivism and objectivism, which are theoretical accounts of the nature of meaningfulness insofar as it is physical. They differ in terms of the extent to which the human mind constitutes meaning and whether there are conditions of meaning that are invariant among human beings. Subjectivists believe that there are no invariant standards of meaning because meaning is relative to the subject, i.e., depends on an individual’s pro-attitudes such as her particular desires or ends, which are not shared by everyone. Roughly, something is meaningful for a person if she strongly wants it or intends to seek it out and she gets it. Objectivists maintain, in contrast, that there are some invariant standards for meaning because meaning is at least partly mind-independent, i.e., obtains not merely in virtue of being the object of anyone’s mental states. Here, something is meaningful (partially) because of its intrinsic nature, in the sense of being independent of whether it is wanted or intended; meaning is instead (to some extent) the sort of thing that merits these reactions.

There is logical space for an orthogonal view, according to which there are invariant standards of meaningfulness constituted by what all human beings would converge on from a certain standpoint. However, it has not been much of a player in the field (Darwall 1983, 164–66).

According to this version of naturalism, meaning in life varies from person to person, depending on each one’s variable pro-attitudes. Common instances are views that one’s life is more meaningful, the more one gets what one happens to want strongly, achieves one’s highly ranked goals, or does what one believes to be really important (Trisel 2002; Hooker 2008). One influential subjectivist has recently maintained that the relevant mental state is caring or loving, so that life is meaningful just to the extent that one cares about or loves something (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94, 2004). Another recent proposal is that meaningfulness consists of “an active engagement and affirmation that vivifies the person who has freely created or accepted and now promotes and nurtures the projects of her highest concern” (Belliotti 2019, 183).

Subjectivism was dominant in the middle of the twentieth century, when positivism, noncognitivism, existentialism, and Humeanism were influential (Ayer 1947; Hare 1957; Barnes 1967; Taylor 1970; Williams 1976). However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, inference to the best explanation and reflective equilibrium became accepted forms of normative argumentation and were frequently used to defend claims about the existence and nature of objective value (or of “external reasons,” ones obtaining independently of one’s extant attitudes). As a result, subjectivism about meaning lost its dominance. Those who continue to hold subjectivism often remain suspicious of attempts to justify beliefs about objective value (e.g., Trisel 2002, 73, 79, 2004, 378–79; Frankfurt 2004, 47–48, 55–57; Wong 2008, 138–39; Evers 2017, 32, 36; Svensson 2017, 54). Theorists are moved to accept subjectivism typically because the alternatives are unpalatable; they are reasonably sure that meaning in life obtains for some people, but do not see how it could be grounded on something independent of the mind, whether it be the natural or the supernatural (or the non-natural). In contrast to these possibilities, it appears straightforward to account for what is meaningful in terms of what people find meaningful or what people want out of their lives. Wide-ranging meta-ethical debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language are necessary to address this rationale for subjectivism.

There is a cluster of other, more circumscribed arguments for subjectivism, according to which this theory best explains certain intuitive features of meaning in life. For one, subjectivism seems plausible since it is reasonable to think that a meaningful life is an authentic one (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94). If a person’s life is significant insofar as she is true to herself or her deepest nature, then we have some reason to believe that meaning simply is a function of those matters for which the person cares. For another, it is uncontroversial that often meaning comes from losing oneself, i.e., in becoming absorbed in an activity or experience, as opposed to being bored by it or finding it frustrating (Frankfurt 1988, 80–94; Belliotti 2019, 162–70). Work that concentrates the mind and relationships that are engrossing seem central to meaning and to be so because of the subjective elements involved. For a third, meaning is often taken to be something that makes life worth continuing for a specific person, i.e., that gives her a reason to get out of bed in the morning, which subjectivism is thought to account for best (Williams 1976; Svensson 2017; Calhoun 2018).

Critics maintain that these arguments are vulnerable to a common objection: they neglect the role of objective value (or an external reason) in realizing oneself, losing oneself, and having a reason to live (Taylor 1989, 1992; Wolf 2010, 2015, 89–140). One is not really being true to oneself, losing oneself in a meaningful way, or having a genuine reason to live insofar as one, say, successfully maintains 3,732 hairs on one’s head (Taylor 1992, 36), cultivates one’s prowess at long-distance spitting (Wolf 2010, 104), collects a big ball of string (Wolf 2010, 104), or, well, eats one’s own excrement (Wielenberg 2005, 22). The counterexamples suggest that subjective conditions are insufficient to ground meaning in life; there seem to be certain actions, relationships, and states that are objectively valuable (but see Evers 2017, 30–32) and toward which one’s pro-attitudes ought to be oriented, if meaning is to accrue.

So say objectivists, but subjectivists feel the pull of the point and usually seek to avoid the counterexamples, lest they have to bite the bullet by accepting the meaningfulness of maintaining 3,732 hairs on one’s head and all the rest (for some who do, see Svensson 2017, 54–55; Belliotti 2019, 181–83). One important strategy is to suggest that subjectivists can avoid the counterexamples by appealing to the right sort of pro-attitude. Instead of whatever an individual happens to want, perhaps the relevant mental state is an emotional-perceptual one of seeing-as (Alexis 2011; cf. Hosseini 2015, 47–66), a “categorical” desire, that is, an intrinsic desire constitutive of one’s identity that one takes to make life worth continuing (Svensson 2017), or a judgment that one has a good reason to value something highly for its own sake (Calhoun 2018). Even here, though, objectivists will argue that it might “appear that whatever the will chooses to treat as a good reason to engage itself is, for the will, a good reason. But the will itself....craves objective reasons; and often it could not go forward unless it thought it had them” (Wiggins 1988, 136). And without any appeal to objectivity, it is perhaps likely that counterexamples would resurface.

Another subjectivist strategy by which to deal with the counterexamples is the attempt to ground meaningfulness, not on the pro-attitudes of an individual valuer, but on those of a group (Darwall 1983, 164–66; Brogaard and Smith 2005; Wong 2008). Does such an intersubjective move avoid (more of) the counterexamples? If so, does it do so more plausibly than an objective theory?

Objective naturalists believe that meaning in life is constituted at least in part by something physical beyond merely the fact that it is the object of a pro-attitude. Obtaining the object of some emotion, desire, or judgment is not sufficient for meaningfulness, on this view. Instead, there are certain conditions of the material world that could confer meaning on anyone’s life, not merely because they are viewed as meaningful, wanted for their own sake, or believed to be choiceworthy, but instead (at least partially) because they are inherently worthwhile or valuable in themselves.

Morality (the good), enquiry (the true), and creativity (the beautiful) are widely held instances of activities that confer meaning on life, while trimming toenails and eating snow––along with the counterexamples to subjectivism above––are not. Objectivism is widely thought to be a powerful general explanation of these particular judgments: the former are meaningful not merely because some agent (whether it is an individual, her society, or even God) cares about them or judges them to be worth doing, while the latter simply lack significance and cannot obtain it even if some agent does care about them or judge them to be worth doing. From an objective perspective, it is possible for an individual to care about the wrong thing or to be mistaken that something is worthwhile, and not merely because of something she cares about all the more or judges to be still more choiceworthy. Of course, meta-ethical debates about the existence and nature of value are again relevant to appraising this rationale.

Some objectivists think that being the object of a person’s mental states plays no constitutive role in making that person’s life meaningful, although they of course contend that it often plays an instrumental role––liking a certain activity, after all, is likely to motivate one to do it. Relatively few objectivists are “pure” in that way, although consequentialists do stand out as clear instances (e.g., Singer 1995; Smuts 2018, 75–99). Most objectivists instead try to account for the above intuitions driving subjectivism by holding that a life is more meaningful, not merely because of objective factors, but also in part because of propositional attitudes such as cognition, conation, and emotion. Particularly influential has been Susan Wolf’s hybrid view, captured by this pithy slogan: “Meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness” (Wolf 2015, 112; see also Kekes 1986, 2000; Wiggins 1988; Raz 2001, 10–40; Mintoff 2008; Wolf 2010, 2016; Fischer 2019, 9–23; Belshaw 2021, 160–81). This theory implies that no meaning accrues to one’s life if one believes in, is satisfied by, or cares about a project that is not truly worthwhile, or if one takes up a truly worthwhile project but fails to judge it important, be satisfied by it, or care about it. A related approach is that, while subjective attraction is not necessary for meaning, it could enhance it (e.g., Audi 2005, 344; Metz 2013, 183–84, 196–98, 220–25). For instance, a stereotypical Mother Teresa who is bored by and alienated from her substantial charity work might have a somewhat significant existence because of it, even if she would have an even more significant existence if she felt pride in it or identified with it.

There have been several attempts to capture theoretically what all objectively attractive, inherently worthwhile, or finally valuable conditions have in common insofar as they bear on meaning in a person’s life. Over the past few decades, one encounters the proposals that objectively meaningful conditions are just those that involve: positively connecting with organic unity beyond oneself (Nozick 1981, 594–619); being creative (Taylor 1987; Matheson 2018); living an emotional life (Solomon 1993; cf. Williams 2020, 56–78); promoting good consequences, such as improving the quality of life of oneself and others (Singer 1995; Audi 2005; Smuts 2018, 75–99); exercising or fostering rational nature in exceptional ways (Smith 1997, 179–221; Gewirth 1998, 177–82; Metz 2013, 222–36); progressing toward ends that can never be fully realized because one’s knowledge of them changes as one approaches them (Levy 2005); realizing goals that are transcendent for being long-lasting in duration and broad in scope (Mintoff 2008); living virtuously (May 2015, 61–138; McPherson 2020); and loving what is worth loving (Wolf 2016). There is as yet no convergence in the field on one, or even a small cluster, of these accounts.

One feature of a large majority of the above naturalist theories is that they are aggregative or additive, objectionably treating a life as a mere “container” of bits of life that are meaningful considered in isolation from other bits (Brännmark 2003, 330). It has become increasingly common for philosophers of life’s meaning, especially objectivists, to hold that life as a whole, or at least long stretches of it, can substantially affect its meaningfulness beyond the amount of meaning (if any) in its parts.

For instance, a life that has lots of beneficence and otherwise intuitively meaning-conferring conditions but that is also extremely repetitive (à la the movie Groundhog Day ) is less than maximally meaningful (Taylor 1987; Blumenfeld 2009). Furthermore, a life that not only avoids repetition but also ends with a substantial amount of meaningful (or otherwise desirable) parts seems to have more meaning overall than one that has the same amount of meaningful (desirable) parts but ends with few or none of them (Kamm 2013, 18–22; Dorsey 2015). Still more, a life in which its meaningless (or otherwise undesirable parts) cause its meaningful (desirable) parts to come about through a process of personal growth seems meaningful in virtue of this redemptive pattern, “good life-story,” or narrative self-expression (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Wong 2008; Fischer 2009, 145–77; Kauppinen 2012; May 2015, 61–138; Velleman 2015, 141–73). These three cases suggest that meaning can inhere in life as a whole, that is, in the relationships between its parts, and not merely in the parts considered in isolation. However, some would maintain that it is, strictly speaking, the story that is or could be told of a life that matters, not so much the life-story qua relations between events themselves (de Bres 2018).

There are pure or extreme versions of holism present in the literature, according to which the only possible bearer of meaning in life is a person’s life as a whole, and not any isolated activities, relationships, or states (Taylor 1989, 48–51; Tabensky 2003; Levinson 2004). A salient argument for this position is that judgments of the meaningfulness of a part of someone’s life are merely provisional, open to revision upon considering how they fit into a wider perspective. So, for example, it would initially appear that taking an ax away from a madman and thereby protecting innocent parties confers some meaning on one’s life, but one might well revise that judgment upon learning that the intention behind it was merely to steal an ax, not to save lives, or that the madman then took out a machine gun, causing much more harm than his ax would have. It is worth considering how far this sort of case is generalizable, and, if it can be to a substantial extent, whether that provides strong evidence that only life as a whole can exhibit meaningfulness.

Perhaps most objectivists would, at least upon reflection, accept that both the parts of a life and the whole-life relationships among the parts can exhibit meaning. Supposing there are two bearers of meaning in a life, important questions arise. One is whether a certain narrative can be meaningful even if its parts are not, while a second is whether the meaningfulness of a part increases if it is an aspect of a meaningful whole (on which see Brännmark 2003), and a third is whether there is anything revealing to say about how to make tradeoffs between the parts and whole in cases where one must choose between them (Blumenfeld 2009 appears to assign lexical priority to the whole).

Naturalists until recently had been largely concerned to show that meaning in life is possible without God or a soul; they have not spent much time considering how such spiritual conditions might enhance meaning, but have, in moderate fashion, tended to leave that possibility open (an exception is Hooker 2008). Lately, however, an extreme form of naturalism has arisen, according to which our lives would probably, if not unavoidably, have less meaning in a world with God or a soul than in one without. Although such an approach was voiced early on by Baier (1957), it is really in the past decade or so that this “anti-theist” position has become widely and intricately discussed.

One rationale, mentioned above as an objection to the view that God’s purpose constitutes meaning in life, has also been deployed to argue that the existence of God as such would necessarily reduce meaning, that is, would consist of anti-matter. It is the idea that master/servant and parent/child analogies so prominent in the monotheist religious traditions reveal something about our status in a world where there is a qualitatively higher being who has created us with certain ends in mind: our independence or dignity as adult persons would be violated (e.g., Baier 1957/2000, 118–20; Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 121–41). One interesting objection to this reasoning has been to accept that God’s existence is necessarily incompatible with the sort of meaning that would come (roughly stated) from being one’s own boss, but to argue that God would also make greater sorts of meaning available, offering a net gain to us (Mawson 2016, 110–58).

Another salient argument for thinking that God would detract from meaning in life appeals to the value of privacy (Kahane 2011, 681–85; Lougheed 2020, 55–110). God’s omniscience would unavoidably make it impossible for us to control another person’s access to the most intimate details about ourselves, which, for some, amounts to a less meaningful life than one with such control. Beyond questioning the value of our privacy in relation to God, one thought-provoking criticism has been to suggest that, if a lack of privacy really would substantially reduce meaning in our lives, then God, qua morally perfect person, would simply avoid knowing everything about us (Tooley 2018). Lacking complete knowledge of our mental states would be compatible with describing God as “omniscient,” so the criticism goes, insofar as that is plausibly understood as having as much knowledge as is morally permissible.

Turn, now, to major arguments for thinking that having a soul would reduce life’s meaning, so that if one wants a maximally meaningful life, one should prefer a purely physical world, or at least one in which people are mortal. First and foremost, there has been the argument that an immortal life could not avoid becoming boring (Williams 1973), rendering life pointless according to many subjective and objective theories. The literature on this topic has become enormous, with the central reply being that immortality need not get boring (for more recent discussions, see Fischer 2009, 79–101, 2019, 117–42; Mawson 2019, 51–52; Williams 2020, 30–41, 123–29; Belshaw 2021, 182–97). However, it might also be worth questioning whether boredom is sufficient for meaninglessness. Suppose, for instance, that one volunteers to be bored so that many others will not be bored; perhaps this would be a meaningful sacrifice to make. Being bored for an eternity would not be blissful or even satisfying, to be sure, but if it served the function of preventing others from being bored for an eternity, would it be meaningful (at least to some degree)? If, as is commonly held, sacrificing one’s life could be meaningful, why not also sacrificing one’s liveliness?

Another reason given to reject eternal life is that it would become repetitive, which would substantially drain it of meaning (Scarre 2007, 54–55; May 2009, 46–47, 64–65, 71; Smuts 2011, 142–44; cf. Blumenfeld 2009). If, as it appears, there are only a finite number of actions one could perform, relationships one could have, and states one could be in during an eternity, one would have to end up doing the same things again. Even though one’s activities might be more valuable than rolling a stone up a hill forever à la Sisyphus, the prospect of doing them over and over again forever is disheartening for many. To be sure, one might not remember having done them before and hence could avoid boredom, but for some philosophers that would make it all the worse, akin to having dementia and forgetting that one has told the same stories. Others, however, still find meaning in such a life (e.g., Belshaw 2021, 197, 205n41).

A third meaning-based argument against immortality invokes considerations of narrative. If the pattern of one’s life as a whole substantially matters, and if a proper pattern would include a beginning, a middle, and an end, it appears that a life that never ends would lack the relevant narrative structure. “Because it would drag on endlessly, it would, sooner or later, just be a string of events lacking all form....With immortality, the novel never ends....How meaningful can such a novel be?” (May 2009, 68, 72; see also Scarre 2007, 58–60). Notice that this objection is distinct from considerations of boredom and repetition (which concern novelty ); even if one were stimulated and active, and even if one found a way not to repeat one’s life in the course of eternity, an immortal life would appear to lack shape. In reply, some reject the idea that a meaningful life must be akin to a novel, and intead opt for narrativity in the form of something like a string of short stories that build on each other (Fischer 2009, 145–77, 2019, 101–16). Others, though, have sought to show that eternity could still be novel-like, deeming the sort of ending that matters to be a function of what the content is and how it relates to the content that came before (e.g., Seachris 2011; Williams 2020, 112–19).

There have been additional objections to immortality as undercutting meaningfulness, but they are prima facie less powerful than the previous three in that, if sound, they arguably show that an eternal life would have a cost, but probably not one that would utterly occlude the prospect of meaning in it. For example, there have been the suggestions that eternal lives would lack a sense of preciousness and urgency (Nussbaum 1989, 339; Kass 2002, 266–67), could not exemplify virtues such as courageously risking one’s life for others (Kass 2002, 267–68; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94), and could not obtain meaning from sustaining or saving others’ lives (Nussbaum 1989, 338; Wielenberg 2005, 91–94). Note that at least the first two rationales turn substantially on the belief in immortality, not quite immortality itself: if one were immortal but forgot that one is or did not know that at all, then one could appreciate life and obtain much of the virtue of courage (and, conversely, if one were not immortal, but thought that one is, then, by the logic of these arguments, one would fail to appreciate limits and be unable to exemplify courage).

The previous two sections addressed theoretical accounts of what would confer meaning on a human person’s life. Although these theories do not imply that some people’s lives are in fact meaningful, that has been the presumption of a very large majority of those who have advanced them. Much of the procedure has been to suppose that many lives have had meaning in them and then to consider in virtue of what they have or otherwise could. However, there are nihilist (or pessimist) perspectives that question this supposition. According to nihilism (pessimism), what would make a life meaningful in principle cannot obtain for any of us.

One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of extreme supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism about whether a spiritual realm exists. If you believe that God or a soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither is real, then you are committed to nihilism, to the denial that life can have any meaning. Athough this rationale for nihilism was prominent in the modern era (and was more or less Camus’ position), it has been on the wane in analytic philosophical circles, as extreme supernaturalism has been eclipsed by the moderate variety.

The most common rationales for nihilism these days do not appeal to supernaturalism, or at least not explicitly. One cluster of ideas appeals to what meta-ethicists call “error theory,” the view that evaluative claims (in this case about meaning in life, or about morality qua necessary for meaning) characteristically posit objectively real or universally justified values, but that such values do not exist. According to one version, value judgments often analytically include a claim to objectivity but there is no reason to think that objective values exist, as they “would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe” (Mackie 1977/1990, 38). According to a second version, life would be meaningless if there were no set of moral standards that could be fully justified to all rational enquirers, but it so happens that such standards cannot exist for persons who can always reasonably question a given claim (Murphy 1982, 12–17). According to a third, we hold certain beliefs about the objectivity and universality of morality and related values such as meaning because they were evolutionarily advantageous to our ancestors, not because they are true. Humans have been “deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a distinterested, objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey” (Ruse and Wilson 1986, 179; cf. Street 2015). One must draw on the intricate work in meta-ethics that has been underway for the past several decades in order to appraise these arguments.

In contrast to error-theoretic arguments for nihilism, there are rationales for it accepting that objective values exist but denying that our lives can ever exhibit or promote them so as to obtain meaning. One version of this approach maintains that, for our lives to matter, we must be in a position to add objective value to the world, which we are not since the objective value of the world is already infinite (Smith 2003). The key premises for this view are that every bit of space-time (or at least the stars in the physical universe) have some positive value, that these values can be added up, and that space is infinite. If the physical world at present contains an infinite degree of value, nothing we do can make a difference in terms of meaning, for infinity plus any amount of value remains infinity. One way to question this argument, beyond doubting the value of space-time or stars, is to suggest that, even if one cannot add to the value of the universe, meaning plausibly comes from being the source of certain values.

A second rationale for nihilism that accepts the existence of objective value is David Benatar’s (2006, 18–59) intriguing “asymmetry argument” for anti-natalism, the view that it is immoral to bring new people into existence because doing so would always be on balance bad for them. For Benatar, the bads of existing (e.g., pains) are real disadvantages relative to not existing, while the goods of existing (pleasures) are not real advantages relative to not existing, since there is in the latter state no one to be deprived of them. If indeed the state of not existing is no worse than that of experiencing the benefits of existence, then, since existing invariably brings harm in its wake, it follows that existing is always worse compared to not existing. Although this argument is illustrated with experiential goods and bads, it seems generalizable to non-experiential ones, including meaning in life and anti-matter. The literature on this argument has become large (for a recent collection, see Hauskeller and Hallich 2022).

Benatar (2006, 60–92, 2017, 35–63) has advanced an additional argument for nihilism, one that appeals to Thomas Nagel’s (1986, 208–32) widely discussed analysis of the extremely external standpoint that human persons can take on their lives. There exists, to use Henry Sidgwick’s influential phrase, the “point of view of the universe,” that is, the standpoint that considers a human being’s life in relation to all times and all places. When one takes up this most external standpoint and views one’s puny impact on the world, little of one’s life appears to matter. What one does in a certain society on Earth over 75 years or so just does not amount to much, when considering the billions of temporal years and billions of light-years that make up space-time. Although this reasoning grants limited kinds of meaning to human beings, from a personal, social, or human perspective, Benatar both denies that the greatest sort of meaning––a cosmic one––is available to them and contends that this makes their lives bad, hence the “nihilist” tag. Some have objected that our lives could in fact have a cosmic significance, say, if they played a role in God’s plan (Quinn 2000, 65–66; Swinburne 2016, 154), were the sole ones with a dignity in the universe (Kahane 2014), or engaged in valuable activities that could be appreciated by anyone anywhere anytime (Wolf 2016, 261–62). Others naturally maintain that cosmic significance is irrelevant to appraising a human life, with some denying that it would be a genuine source of meaning (Landau 2017, 93–99), and others accepting that it would be but maintaining that the absence of this good would not count as a bad or merit regret (discussed in Benatar 2017, 56–62; Williams 2020, 108–11).

Finally, a distinguishable source of nihilism concerns the ontological, as distinct from axiological, preconditions for meaning in life. Perhaps most radically, there are those who deny that we have selves. Do we indeed lack selves, and, if we do, is a meaningful life impossible for us (see essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018; Le Bihan 2019)? Somewhat less radically, there are those who grant that we have selves, but deny that they are in charge in the relevant way. That is, some have argued that we lack self-governance or free will of the sort that is essential for meaning in life, at least if determinism is true (Pisciotta 2013; essays in Caruso and Flanagan 2018). Non-quantum events, including human decisions, appear to be necessited by a prior state of the world, such that none could have been otherwise, and many of our decisions are a product of unconscious neurological mechanisms (while quantum events are of course utterly beyond our control). If none of our conscious choices could have been avoided and all were ultimately necessited by something external to them, perhaps they are insufficient to merit pride or admiration or to constitute narrative authorship of a life. In reply, some maintain that a compatibilism between determinism and moral responsibility applies with comparable force to meaning in life (e.g., Arpaly 2006; Fischer 2009, 145–77), while others contend that incompatibilism is true of moral responsibility but not of meaning (Pereboom 2014).

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The Origin of Life: Creationism and Science Essay

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Introduction

Views on the origin of the earth, origin of human race according to creationists and evolutionists, science teachers cannot rule out creationism while teaching evolution.

For many years creationists and evolutionists have had conflicting views about the origin of life. Creationists base their arguments on biblical context, while evolutionists rely on evidence to explain their views on how life began. Creationists believe that the earth and the life in it were created by a God who is a supreme being. On the other hand, scientists argue that life began as a slow process of molecular changes, which gradually grew into complex and differentiated living things. Although creationists argue their points using evidence, their arguments lack adequate credibility as they fail to explain the origin of the first molecule of life without mentioning super intelligent power.

Even though the views held by both sides are important in understanding the origin of life, creationists have stronger arguments than evolutionists. For these reasons, some scientific views lean on religion from a critical point of view.

Notably, creationists argue that the earth has a beginning but fails to state the exact time of its creation because, before then, time, space and matter were non-existent. On the other hand, evolutionists suggest that the earth is ageless as it has always existed. It is indisputable to argue that the earth, like everything else, has a starting point. However, evolutionist dispute the creationist about the beginning of the earth, suggesting that the earth had existed even before the creation time mentioned in the Bible but failed to provide evidence about the earth’s eternity. The evolutionist claims about the earth’s eternity suggest the timeless nature of when the earth began, a view that creationists hold. Therefore, creationists’ argument emerges superior as scientists cannot prove the earth’s existence before the instance quoted in the Bible.

Undeniably, the arguments of creationism about life’s origin are clearer than those of evolutionists. Arguably, the creationist view about the human race originating from Adam and Eve is more credible as procreation is evident as the process by which new lives are made. Living things give birth to their kinds, a notion that disputes the possibility of all living things originating from a single source. Therefore it is impossible to believe that life came from a simple molecule through evolution because today, there is no living evidence showing how molecules form a source of life. Evolutionists have weak evidence about the origin of life as they focus on explaining life processes that lead to the formation of species through biological means, which the Bible also explains in a creationism version.

The former confirms the latter’s arguments no matter how much science tries to dispute creationism. As a result, creationism continues to gain more popularity globally compared to evolution theories. Some recent scientists agree that creationism arguments are indispensable. Therefore, some evolutionists are worried that creationism might dilute evolutionism because a substantial percentage of science teachers are teaching evolution from a creationist perspective due to several factors. These factors include diversity of students in a science class. In addition, some science teachers are creationism advocates who believe understanding both theories and makes teaching evolution more interesting.

In conclusion, arguments from both creationists and evolutionists are important in understanding the origin of life. However, creationism is superior to evolutionism because the former explains life to originate in God’s creation. In contrast, evolution theories focus on explaining the formation of different species and adaptive changes that occur during the life of an organism. However, the evolutionist fails to explain where the species originate. A single molecule evolving to produce all life forms with diverse characteristics is a self-contradicting claim. In addition, evolutionists cannot explain why molecular evolution, which marks the begging of life, stopped and never occur today while procreation has persisted as a form of life-generating process. Therefore creationism arguments outweigh those of evolutionists in terms of credibility and clarity.

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v.3(3); 2013 Mar

The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will never know

1 Department of Chemistry, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, 84105, Israel

Robert Pascal

2 Institut des Biomolécules Max Mousseron (UMR 5247, CNRS, Universités Montpellier 1 and Montpellier 2), Université Montpellier 2, Place E. Bataillon 34095, Montpellier Cedex 05, France

The origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time. In this essay, we propose that following recent experimental and theoretical advances in systems chemistry, the underlying principle governing the emergence of life on the Earth can in its broadest sense be specified, and may be stated as follows: all stable (persistent) replicating systems will tend to evolve over time towards systems of greater stability. The stability kind referred to, however, is dynamic kinetic stability, and quite distinct from the traditional thermodynamic stability which conventionally dominates physical and chemical thinking. Significantly, that stability kind is generally found to be enhanced by increasing complexification, since added features in the replicating system that improve replication efficiency will be reproduced, thereby offering an explanation for the emergence of life's extraordinary complexity. On the basis of that simple principle, a fundamental reassessment of the underlying chemistry–biology relationship is possible, one with broad ramifications. In the context of the OOL question, this novel perspective can assist in clarifying central ahistoric aspects of abiogenesis, as opposed to the many historic aspects that have probably been forever lost in the mists of time.

2. Introduction

The origin of life (OOL) problem continues to be one of the most intriguing and challenging questions in science (for recent reviews on the OOL, see [ 1 – 6 ]). Its resolution would not only satisfy man's curiosity regarding this central existential issue, but would also shed light on a directly related topic—the precise nature of the physico-chemical relationship linking animate and inanimate matter. As one of us (A.P.) has noted previously [ 1 , 7 , 8 ], until the principles governing the process by which life on the Earth emerged can be uncovered, an understanding of life's essence, the basis for its striking characteristics, and outlining a feasible strategy for the synthesis of what could be classified as a simple life form will probably remain out of reach. In this essay, we will argue that recent developments in systems chemistry [ 9 – 11 ] have dramatically changed our ability to deal with the OOL problem by enabling the chemistry–biology connection to be clarified, at least in broad outline. The realization that abiogenesis—the chemical process by which simplest life emerged from inanimate beginnings—and biological evolution may actually be one single continuous physico-chemical process with an identifiable driving force opens up new avenues towards resolution of the OOL problem [ 1 , 7 , 12 , 13 ]. In fact that unification actually enables the basic elements of abiogenesis to be outlined, in much the same way that Darwin's biological theory outlined the basic mechanism for biological evolution. The goal of this commentary therefore is to discuss what aspects of the OOL problem can now be considered as resolved, what aspects require further study and what aspects may, in all probability, never be known.

3. Is the origin of life problem soluble in principle?

In addressing the OOL question, it first needs to be emphasized that the question has two distinct facets—historic and ahistoric, and the ability to uncover each of these two facets is quite different. Uncovering the historic facet is the more problematic one. Uncovering that facet would require specifying the original chemical system from which the process of abiogenesis began, together with the chemical pathway from that initiating system right through the extensive array of intermediate structures leading to simplest life. Regretfully, however, much of that historic information will probably never be known. Evolutionary processes are contingent, suggesting that any number of feasible pathways could have led from inanimate matter to earliest life, provided, of course, that those pathways were consistent with the underlying laws of physics and chemistry. The difficulty arises because historic events, once they have taken place, can only be revealed if their occurrence was recorded in some manner. Indeed, it is this historic facet of abiogenesis that makes the OOL problem so much more intractable than the parallel question of biological evolution. Biological evolution also has its historic and ahistoric facets. But whereas for biological evolution the historic record is to a degree accessible through palaeobiologic and phylogenetic studies, for the process of abiogenesis those methodologies have proved uninformative; there is no known geological record pertaining to prebiotic systems, and phylogenetic studies become less informative the further back one goes in attempting to trace out ancestral lineages. Phylogenetic studies presume the existence of organismal individuality and the genealogical (vertical) transfer of genetic information. However, the possibility that earliest life may have been communal [ 14 ] and dominated by horizontal gene transfer [ 15 – 17 ] suggests that information regarding the evolutionary stages that preceded the last universal common ancestor [ 18 ] would have to be considered highly speculative. Accordingly, the significance of such studies to the characterization of early life, let alone prebiotic systems, becomes highly uncertain.

The conclusion seems clear: speculation regarding the precise historic path from animate to inanimate—the identity of specific materials that were available at particular physical locations on the prebiotic Earth, together with the chemical structures of possible intermediate stages along the long road to life—may lead to propositions that are, though thought-provoking and of undeniable interest, effectively unfalsifiable, and therefore of limited scientific value.

Given that awkward reality, the focus of OOL research needs to remain on the ahistoric aspects—the principles that would explain the remarkable transformation of inanimate matter to simple life. There is good reason to think that the emergence of life on the Earth did not just involve a long string of random chemical events that fortuitously led to a simple living system. If life had emerged in such an arbitrary way, then the mechanistic question of abiogenesis would be fundamentally without explanation—a stupendously improbable chemical outcome whose likelihood of repetition would be virtually zero. However, the general view, now strongly supported by recent studies in systems chemistry, is that the process of abiogenesis was governed by underlying physico-chemical principles, and the central goal of OOL studies should therefore be to delineate those principles. Significantly, even if the underlying principles governing the transformation of inanimate to animate were to be revealed, that would still not mean that the precise historic path could be specified. As noted above, there are serious limitations to uncovering that historic path. The point however is that if the principles underlying life's emergence on the Earth could be more clearly delineated, then the mystery of abiogenesis would be dramatically transformed. No longer would the problem of abiogenesis be one of essence , but rather one of detail . The major mystery at the heart of the OOL debate would be broadly resolved and the central issue would effectively be replaced by a variety of chemical questions that deal with the particular mechanisms by which those underlying principles could have been expressed. Issues such as identifying historic transitions, the definition of life, would become to some extent arbitrary and ruled by scientific conventions, rather than by matters of principle.

4. The role of autocatalysis during abiogenesis

In the context of the OOL debate, there is one single and central historic fact on which there is broad agreement—that life's emergence was initiated by some autocatalytic chemical system. The two competing narratives within the OOL's long-standing debate—‘replication first’ or ‘metabolism first’—though differing in key elements, both build on that autocatalytic character (see [ 1 ] and references therein). The ‘replication first’ school of thought stresses the role of oligomeric compounds, which express that autocatalytic capability through their ability to self-replicate, an idea that can be traced back almost a century to the work of Troland [ 19 ], while the ‘metabolism first’ school of thought emphasizes the emergence of cyclic networks, as articulated by Kauffman [ 20 ] in the 1980s and reminiscent of the metabolic cycles found in all extant life. With respect to this issue, we have recently pointed out that these two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It could well be that both oligomeric entities and cyclic networks were crucial elements during life's emergence, thereby offering a novel perspective on this long-standing question [ 1 , 7 ]. However, once it is accepted that autocatalysis is a central element in the process of abiogenesis, it follows that the study of autocatalytic systems in general may help uncover the principles that govern their chemical behaviour, regardless of their chemical detail. Indeed, as we will now describe, the generally accepted supposition that life's origins emerged from some prebiotic autocatalytic process can be shown to lead to broad insights into the chemistry–biology connection and to the surprising revelation that the processes of abiogenesis and biological evolution are directly related to one another. Once established, that connection will enable the underlying principles that governed the emergence of life on the Earth to be uncovered without undue reliance on speculative historic suppositions regarding the precise nature of those prebiotic systems.

5. A previously unrecognized stability kind: dynamic kinetic stability

The realization that the autocatalytic character of the replication reaction can lead to exponential growth and is unsustainable has been long appreciated, going back at least to Thomas Malthus's classic treatise ‘An essay on the principle of population’, published in 1798 [ 21 ]. But the chemical consequences of that long-recognized powerful kinetic character, although described by Lotka already a century ago [ 22 ], do not seem to have been adequately appreciated. Recently, one of us (A.P.) has described a new stability kind in nature, seemingly overlooked in modern scientific thought, which we have termed dynamic kinetic stability ( DKS ) [ 1 , 7 , 23 , 24 ] . That stability kind, applicable solely to persistent replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, derives directly from the powerful kinetic character and the inherent unsustainability of the replication process. However, for the replication reaction to be kinetically unsustainable, the reverse reaction, in which the replicating system reverts back to its component building blocks, must be very slow when compared with the forward reaction; the replication reaction must be effectively irreversible. That condition, in turn, means the system must be maintained in a far-from-equilibrium state [ 25 ], and that continuing requirement is satisfied through the replicating system being open and continually fed activated component building blocks. Note that the above description is consistent with Prigogine's non-equilibrium thermodynamic approach, which stipulates that self-organized behaviour is associated with irreversible processes within the nonlinear regime [ 26 ]. From the above, it follows that the DKS term would not be applicable to an equilibrium mixture of some oligomeric replicating entity together with its interconverting component building blocks.

Given the above discussion, it is apparent that the DKS concept is quite distinct from the conventional stability kind in nature, thermodynamic stability. A key feature of DKS is that it characterizes populations of replicators , rather than the individual replicators which make up those populations. Individual replicating entities are inherently unstable , as reflected in their continual turnover, whereas a population of replicators can be remarkably stable, as expressed by the persistence of some replicating populations. Certain life forms (e.g. cyanobacteria) express this stability kind in dramatic fashion, having been able to maintain a conserved function and a readily recognized morphology over billions of years. Indeed, within the world of replicators, there is theoretical and empirical evidence for a selection rule that in some respects parallels the second law of thermodynamics in that less stable replicating systems tend to become transformed into more stable ones [ 1 , 8 ]. This stability kind, which is applicable to all persistent replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, is then able to place biological systems within a more general physico-chemical framework, thereby enabling a physico-chemical merging of replicating chemical systems with biological ones. Studies in systems chemistry in recent years have provided empirical support for such a view by demonstrating that chemical and biological replicators show remarkably similar reactivity patterns, thereby reaffirming the existence of a common underlying framework linking chemistry to biology [ 1 , 7 ].

6. Extending Darwinian theory to inanimate chemical systems

The recognition that a distinctly different stability kind, DKS, is applicable to both chemical and biological replicators, together with the fact that both replicator kinds express similar reaction characteristics, leads to the profound conclusion that the so-called chemical phase leading to simplest life and the biological phase appear to be one continuous physico-chemical process, as illustrated in scheme 1 .

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Unification of abiogenesis and biological evolution into a single continuous process governed by the drive toward greater DKS.

That revelation is valuable as it offers insights into abiogenesis from studies in biological evolution and, vice versa, it can provide new insights into the process of biological evolution from systems chemistry studies of simple replicating systems. A single continuous process necessarily means one set of governing principles, which in turn means that the two seemingly distinct processes of abiogenesis and evolution can be combined and addressed in concert. Significantly, that merging of chemistry and biology suggests that a general theory of evolution, expressed in physico-chemical terms rather than biological ones and applicable to both chemical and biological systems, may be formulated. Its essence may be expressed as follows: All stable ( persistent ) replicating systems will tend to evolve over time towards systems of greater DKS. As we have described in some detail in previous publications, there are both empirical and theoretical grounds for believing that oligomeric replicating systems which are less stable (less persistent) will tend to be transformed into more stable (more persistent) forms [ 1 , 7 , 8 , 24 ]. In fact that selection rule is just a particular application of the more general law of nature, almost axiomatic in character, that systems of all kinds tend from less stable to more stable. That law is inherent in the very definition of the term ‘stability’. So within the global selection rule in nature, normally articulated by the second law of thermodynamics, we can articulate a formulation specific to replicative systems, both chemical and biological— from DKS less stable to DKS more stable . A moment's thought then suggests that the Darwinian concept of ‘fitness maximization’ (i.e. less fit to more fit) is just a more specific expression of that general replicative rule as applied specifically to biological replicators. Whereas, in Darwinian terms, we say that living systems evolve to maximize fitness, the general theory is expressed in physico-chemical terms and stipulates that stable replicating systems, whether chemical or biological, tend to evolve so as to increase their stability, their DKS. Of course such a formulation implies that DKS is quantifiable. As we have previously discussed, quantification is possible, but only for related replicators competing for common resources, for example, a set of structurally related replicating molecules, or a set of genetically related bacterial life forms [ 1 , 7 ]. More generally, when assessing the DKS of replicating systems in a wider sense, one frequently must make do with qualitative or, at best, semi-quantitative measures.

Note that the general theory should not be considered as just one of changing terminology—‘DKS’ replacing ‘fitness’, ‘kinetic selection’ replacing ‘natural selection’. The physico-chemical description offers new insights as it allows the characterization of both the driving force and the mechanisms of evolution in more fundamental terms. The driving force is the drive of replicating systems towards greater stability, but the stability kind that is applicable in the replicative world. In fact that driving force can be thought of as a kind of second law analogue, though, as noted, the open character of replicating systems makes its quantification more difficult. And the mechanisms by which that drive is expressed can now be specified. These are complexification and selection , the former being largely overlooked in the traditional Darwinian view, while the latter is, of course, central to that view. A striking insight from this approach to abiogenesis follows directly: just as Darwinian theory broadly explained biological evolution, so an extended theory of evolution encompassing both chemical and biological replicators can be considered as broadly explaining abiogenesis. Thus, life on the Earth appears to have emerged through the spontaneous emergence of a simple (unidentified) replicating system, initially fragile, which complexified and evolved towards complex replicating systems exhibiting greater DKS. In fact, we would claim that in the very broadest of terms, the physico-chemical basis of abiogenesis can be considered explained.

But does that simplistic explanation for abiogenesis imply that the OOL problem can be considered resolved? Far from it. Let us now consider why.

7. What is still to be learned?

While Darwin's revolutionary theory changed our understanding of how biological systems relate to one another through the simple concept of natural selection, the Darwinian view has undergone considerable refinement and elaboration since its proposal over 150 years ago. First the genomic revolution, which provided Darwin's ideas with a molecular basis through the first decades of the twentieth century, transformed the subject and led to the neo-Darwinian synthesis, an amalgamation of classic Darwinism with population genetics and then with molecular genetics. But in more recent years, there is a growing realization that a molecular approach to understanding evolutionary dynamics is insufficient, that evolutionary biology's more fundamental challenge is to address the unresolved problem of complexity. How did biological complexity come about, and how can that complexity and its dynamic nature be understood? Our point is that Darwin's monumental thesis, with natural selection at its core, was just the beginning of a long process of refinement and elaboration, which has continued unabated to the present day.

Precisely the same process will need to operate with respect to the OOL problem. The DKS concept, simple in essence, does outline in the broadest terms the physico-chemical basis for abiogenesis. But that broad outline needs to be elaborated on through experimental investigation, so that the detailed mechanisms by which the DKS of simple chemical replicating systems could increase would be clarified. Already at this early stage, central elements of those mechanisms are becoming evident. Thus, there are preliminary indications that the process of abiogenesis was one of DKS enhancement through complexification [ 1 , 7 ]. More complex replicating systems, presenting a diversity of features and functions, appear to be able to replicate more effectively than simpler ones, and so are likely to be more stable in DKS terms (though this should not be interpreted to mean that any form of complexification will necessarily lead to enhanced DKS). The pertinent question is then: how does that process of complexification manifest itself? And this is where systems chemistry enters the scene [ 9 – 11 ]. By studying the dynamics of simple replicating molecular systems and the networks they establish, studies in system chemistry are beginning to offer insights into that process of replicative complexification. Following on from earlier work by Sievers & von Kiedrowski [ 27 ] and Lee et al . [ 28 ], more recent studies on RNA replicating systems by Lincoln & Joyce [ 29 ] and most recently by Vaidya et al . [ 30 ] suggest that network formation is crucial. Thus, Lincoln & Joyce [ 28 ] observed that a molecular network based on two cross-catalysing RNAs replicated rapidly and could be sustained indefinitely. By contrast, the most effective single molecule RNA replicator replicated slowly and was not sustainable. But in a more recent landmark experiment, Vaidya et al . [ 30 ] demonstrated that a cooperative cycle made up of three self-replicating RNAs could out-compete those same RNAs acting as individual replicators. The conclusion seems clear: molecular networks are more effective in establishing self-sustainable autocatalytic systems than single molecule replicators, just as was postulated by Eigen & Schuster [ 25 ] some 40 years ago.

Many key questions remain unanswered, however. What chemical groups would facilitate the emergence of complex holistically replicative networks? Are nucleic acids essential for the establishment of such networks, or could other chemical groups also express this capability? Is template binding the main mechanism by which molecular autocatalysis can take place, or can holistically autocatalytic sets be established through cycle closure without a reliance on template binding? How would the emergence of individual self-replicating entities within a larger holistically replicative network contribute to the stability of the network as a whole? How do kinetic and thermodynamic factors inter-relate in facilitating the maintenance of dynamically stable, but thermodynamically unstable, replicating systems [ 12 , 13 ]? As these questions suggest, our understanding of central issues remains rudimentary, and the road to discovery will probably be long and arduous. However, the key point of this essay has been to note that just as Darwin's simple concept of natural selection was able to provide a basis for an ongoing research programme in evolution, one that has been central to biological research for over 150 years, so the DKS concept may be able to offer a basis for ongoing studies in systems chemistry, one that may offer new insights into the rules governing evolutionary dynamics in simple replicating systems and, subsequently, for replicating systems of all kinds. Such a research programme, we believe, promises to further clarify the underlying relationship linking chemical and biological replicators.

In conclusion, it seems probably that we will never know the precise historic path by which life on the Earth emerged, but, very much in the Darwinian tradition, it seems we can now specify the essence of the ahistoric principles by which that process came about. Just as Darwin, in the very simplest of terms, pointed out how natural selection enabled simple life to evolve into complex life, so the recently proposed general theory of evolution [ 1 , 7 ] points out in simplest terms how simple, but fragile, replicating systems could have complexified into the intricate chemical systems of life. But, as discussed earlier, a detailed understanding of that process will have to wait until ongoing studies in systems chemistry reveal both the classes of chemical materials and the kinds of chemical pathways that simple replicating systems are able to follow in their drive towards greater complexity and replicative stability.

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The origin of life: what we know, what we can know and what we will never know

Affiliation.

1 Department of Chemistry, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, Israel. [email protected]
PMID: 23466673
PMCID: PMC3718341
DOI: 10.1098/rsob.120190

The origin of life (OOL) problem remains one of the more challenging scientific questions of all time. In this essay, we propose that following recent experimental and theoretical advances in systems chemistry, the underlying principle governing the emergence of life on the Earth can in its broadest sense be specified, and may be stated as follows: all stable (persistent) replicating systems will tend to evolve over time towards systems of greater stability. The stability kind referred to, however, is dynamic kinetic stability, and quite distinct from the traditional thermodynamic stability which conventionally dominates physical and chemical thinking. Significantly, that stability kind is generally found to be enhanced by increasing complexification, since added features in the replicating system that improve replication efficiency will be reproduced, thereby offering an explanation for the emergence of life's extraordinary complexity. On the basis of that simple principle, a fundamental reassessment of the underlying chemistry-biology relationship is possible, one with broad ramifications. In the context of the OOL question, this novel perspective can assist in clarifying central ahistoric aspects of abiogenesis, as opposed to the many historic aspects that have probably been forever lost in the mists of time.

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Essay on Life Origin Theories

Students are often asked to write an essay on Life Origin Theories in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Life Origin Theories

Introduction to life origin theories.

Life Origin Theories are ideas that scientists have come up with to explain how life started on Earth. They are like detective stories, trying to solve the mystery of where we come from. It’s a big question and there are many different theories.

The Primordial Soup Theory

Panspermia theory.

The Panspermia Theory says life on Earth may have come from space. Tiny life forms or their building blocks could have travelled to Earth on comets or meteorites. This theory suggests life in the universe might be common.

Deep-Sea Vent Theory

The Deep-Sea Vent Theory proposes life started deep in the ocean. In these dark places, hot water full of minerals spews from cracks in the Earth’s crust. This could provide the right conditions for life to start.

Clay Hypothesis

In conclusion, scientists have many theories about how life began. Each theory has evidence to support it, but we still don’t know for sure. The search for the answer is ongoing and exciting.

250 Words Essay on Life Origin Theories

What are life origin theories.

Life Origin Theories are ideas that scientists have come up with to explain how life started on Earth. These theories try to answer a big question – “How did life begin?”

One of the earliest and most famous theories is the Primordial Soup Theory. This theory suggests that life began in a warm “soup” of molecules in the early oceans. Over time, these molecules joined together to form the first living things.

The Panspermia Theory

Another idea is the Panspermia Theory. This theory says that life did not start on Earth at all. Instead, it suggests that life came from outer space! Tiny life forms or their building blocks could have traveled to Earth on comets or meteorites.

The Hydrothermal Vents Theory

The Hydrothermal Vents Theory is another interesting idea. It proposes that life started deep in the ocean. Here, hot water and chemicals from the Earth’s core mix with the cold ocean water. This could have created the right conditions for life to start.

500 Words Essay on Life Origin Theories

The mystery of life’s origin.

The question of how life began on Earth is a mystery that has puzzled scientists for centuries. Many theories have been proposed to explain this fascinating topic. Here, we will discuss some of the most popular theories about the origin of life.

The Primordial Soup Theory, also known as the Oparin-Haldane theory, is one of the oldest and most well-known theories about the origin of life. According to this theory, life began in the oceans of the early Earth around 3.8 billion years ago. These oceans were filled with a mixture of simple chemicals. Over time, with the help of energy from sunlight or lightning, these chemicals combined to form more complex molecules, which eventually led to the first living cells.

The Panspermia Theory suggests that life did not begin on Earth at all, but was brought here from somewhere else in the universe. This could have happened through a meteorite or a comet carrying simple life forms like bacteria or viruses, which then evolved into more complex life forms on Earth.

The Deep-Sea Vent Theory

The rna world hypothesis.

The RNA World Hypothesis is a more recent theory about the origin of life. It suggests that the first life forms were made of RNA, a molecule similar to DNA. According to this theory, these RNA molecules could replicate themselves and evolve, eventually leading to more complex life forms.

In conclusion, the theories about the origin of life are as diverse as life itself. Each theory offers a unique perspective, showing us just how complex and fascinating the question of life’s origin truly is. Whether life began in a primordial soup, came from outer space, started in the deep sea, or was born from RNA, the quest to understand our beginnings is a journey that continues to captivate scientists and students alike.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Happy studying!

What about evolution? Why I embrace science's explanation of human origins

One of the earliest memories from my childhood is getting kicked out of Sunday School.

I remember the basement classroom of the suburban church, with its beige cinder block walls and Bible-themed coloring books, and the discomfort I felt at the age of five.

The teacher was deep into a lesson about Adam and Eve when I asked, "What about evolution?"

I had heard of Charles Darwin and his theories and they didn’t jibe with the teacher's story about the creation of humans from clay and a rib.

Evolution, rather than the unifying concept of biology, was heresy in that classroom.

I never returned to Sunday school, but I did develop a lifelong interest in the 7 million-year-old mystery of how Homo sapiens came to be Earth’s dominant species.

The theory of evolution simply describes how living things change over time, adapting to conditions through the process of natural selection - not too controversial really.

Embracing evolution also allows us to ask fun questions about our earliest ancestors: What did they look like? Why did they descend from trees and take to walking upright? What led humans to develop language, analytical skills, family structures, foibles and sinful natures?

Nearly every aspect of human behavior can be examined through an evolutionary lens.

Let’s start with why we began walking on two legs.

One theory, put forward by Kent State University professor Owen Lovejoy, who was part of the team that examined the famous Lucy fossil back in 1970’s, is that we needed our hands to carry stuff.

It's called the ‘ provisioning theory’ .

I love this theory because it includes committed couples as part of our evolutionary history, something I’m sure my Sunday School teacher would have appreciated.

Lovejoy proposes that early humans needed two hands to carry food and infants, and that females were attracted to males who were good at both carrying stuff and caring for the family.

Lovejoy points out that humans, unlike chimpanzees, don’t have huge, imposing incisor teeth to flash at rivals. Our teeth are small and nonthreatening, and that means males were not competing to acquire female ‘harems’, instead we pair-bonded and took care of each other.

Lovejoy and others believe that the defining evolutionary trait of humans is our ability to cooperate on a level not seen in any of our great ape cousins.

Evolution has taken many twists and turns on the way to Homo sapiens.

One early ancestor, Homo erectus , walked out of Africa and spread over most of Asia two million years ago.

This crafty brute is arguably the most successful human species, having conquered the world with little more than a thick brow ridge and a stone hatchet.

He may also have had fire, which is uniquely human.

Humans later hit a low point known as the ‘population bottleneck’ which is probably the defining moment in the evolution of our species.

According to a sophisticated genetic analysis , the entire human population 900,000 years ago shrunk to around 1,280 people of childbearing age.

That means you and me and all of the more than 8 billion people alive today are descended from what is essentially the population of the average high school scattered across Africa.

Around 500,000 years ago, our closest relatives the Neanderthals left Africa for the icy plains of Europe and Central Asia.

Modern Homo sapiens later met these tough and ancient people and for thousands of years we circled each other in a protracted deadly dance.

Today, every human outside of Africa has some Neanderthal DNA left over from that brief intermingling.

Neanderthals, unlike their brutish reputation, had complex emotional and spiritual lives, according to recent research.

Their downfall was that they just were not as good at working together in groups as we are.

Today, even as we slide into ever increasing factionalism, with war and bloodshed the dominant theme of human history since the fall from grace in the garden of Eden, our ability to work together has been our main evolutionary advantage.

What makes us human, according to evolution, is our ability to get along with each other.

I suppose when I asked the Sunday School teacher, "What about evolution," it presaged my career challenging authority as a journalist.

Embracing evolution was the first step in my lifelong passion for using science to explore what are often unknowable truths.

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The Real Story Behind ‘The Bikeriders’ and the Danny Lyon Photography Book That Inspired It

A new film dramatizes the story of a motorcycle club chronicled by Lyon in the 1960s, offering a tribute to the outlaw spirit

Ellen Wexler

Assistant Editor, Humanities

Danny Lyon considered himself a bikerider, but there were glaring differences between him and the members of the Chicago Outlaws , a notorious motorcycle club. They were blue-collar Midwesterners riding Harleys and living on the outskirts of society. Lyon was a college-educated photographer who rode a Triumph and toted around two cameras and a seven-pound tape recorder .

It was the mid-1960s, and Lyon was following in the footsteps of Hunter S. Thompson, the journalist who rode with—and wrote about —the Hells Angels around the same time. Lyon even sent a letter to Thompson, perhaps expecting encouragement from a like-minded chronicler. Instead, the writer advised Lyon to “get the hell out of that club. … I’ve seen the Angels work, and they scare the hell out of me.” Lyon bristled at this advice, which he later summed up thusly : “[Thompson] advised me not to join the Outlaws and to wear a helmet. I joined the club and seldom wore a helmet.”

Lyon documented the Outlaws for several years, but he was not an objective observer. When The Bikeriders , a collection of photographs and interviews, came out in 1968, Lyon—who had become a full member of the club in 1965—billed it as an “attempt to record and glorify the life of the American bikerider. It is a personal record, dealing mostly with bikeriders whom I know and care for.”

Now, more than 50 years later, The Bikeriders forms the basis of a new movie adaptation of the same name. Directed by Jeff Nichols , the film uses verbatim quotes from Lyon’s interviews for around 70 percent of its dialogue. The plot, meanwhile, is a work of fiction created by weaving the interviews together.

The movie is concerned less with telling a true story than with capturing the feeling of freeways and freedom, of outlaws and open roads—what Lyon calls the “spirit of the bikeriders: the spirit of the hand that twists open the throttle on the crackling engines of big bikes and rides them on racetracks or through traffic or, on occasion, into oblivion.”

Here’s what you need to know about The Bikeriders (both the book and the adaptation) as the film, which stars Austin Butler , Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy , arrives in theaters in the United States on Friday.

The outlaw archetype

In 1957, about a decade before The Bikeriders , Jack Kerouac published On the Road , his famous chronicle of disillusioned, peripatetic young travelers wandering the country and searching for answers. One reviewer described Kerouac as a “kind of literary James Dean,” the actor responsible for a formidable percentage of the motorcycle’s cultural cachet.

Members of Hells Angels rounding a corner on their motorcycles in 1966

Like many young men, Lyon, who was 15 when On the Road came out, was inspired by the book. In the summer of 1962, after wrapping up a semester at the University of Chicago, he asked friends to drop him off along Route 66, “ the road Jack Kerouac used ,” and hitchhiked to Cairo, Illinois, where he saw future congressman John Lewis speak and began photographing scenes from the civil rights movement. By 1964, he was back in Chicago , where he started planning The Bikeriders .

Around this time, Lyon wrote to a publisher about the project. When he revisited the letter many years later, he realized he came across as “a kind of crazy person who writes in this sub-Jack Kerouac-style prose about the open road and the freedom of being an outlaw,” as he told the Observer in 2014.

American motorcycle clubs were also fueled by this outlaw spirit. Their history stretches back to the end of World War II , when returning veterans —particularly those having trouble reintegrating into civilian life—began to form new groups. The lifestyle combined several values these former soldiers clung to: As Vox put it in 2015, “Nostalgia for the camaraderie and risk-taking of the war made the clubs’ focus on male bonding and dangerous activities like, say, riding motorcycles particularly attractive.”

Many such clubs were part of the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA). Membership in the organization, which was founded in 1924 and still exists today, requires adherence to strict rules. Some clubs resisted these rules and formed without the group’s stamp of approval. As Lyon wrote in The Bikeriders , they “are so far in spirit from attitudes of the AMA that they neither want nor could receive AMA sanction. These are known as outlaw clubs.”

Members of outlaw clubs are also known by another term: “ one-percenters .” This identifier comes from an oft-repeated (but possibly false) story about the AMA insisting that 99 percent of motorcyclists are mainstream, law-abiding Americans. The outlaw clubs proudly position themselves in that remaining 1 percent.

One of the first such clubs was the McCook Outlaws , which formed in McCook, Illinois, in the 1930s. After a period of dormancy during World War II, the group came back together and ultimately relocated to Chicago, becoming the Chicago Outlaws in the 1950s, about a decade before Lyon started tagging along.

The bikeriders’ best storyteller

Each of Lyon’s interviewees had a unique perspective on outlaw culture and how they fit into it. Cal, a former airman, had been to 18 countries and “seen what most people have read about.” Rodney Pink, meanwhile, was a motorcycle racer who insisted that “being on a motorcycle don’t make you special at all” and lamented that while “everyone wants to be part of something,” nobody wants to “have any responsibility unloaded on ’em.”

The bikeriders also spoke candidly about the dangers of their lifestyle. Johnny Goodpaster, who once broke his leg in 17 places, called such injuries an “occupational disease,” while “Funny Sonny” described watching a “little guy on his Honda” with a “helmet and everything” who accidentally drove over a cliff.

But as Lyon recalled in a 1997 preface to a new edition of the book, the “best storyteller” of the group was Kathy Bauer , 26, who “didn’t even ride a motorcycle, but was married to Benny, a member of the club.”

According to her interview, Kathy noticed Benny while she was at a bar with a friend, who advised her not to get involved. “Every time he gets up on his bike, he has an accident,” the friend warned. Benny persisted, planting himself outside Kathy’s house and refusing to go home.

“My boyfriend would still come over, and Benny would still sit here, and I’d tell him, ‘You better go home.’ And he wouldn’t go,” she recalled. “So finally, my boyfriend left, and Benny was still around. So he says, ‘Let me take you to the meeting. Everything’ll be real nice.’ So I went to the meeting. After that, I started goin’ out with him. I only went out with him, never with any of the other guys in the club. And five weeks later, I married him.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Danny Lyon (@dannylyonphotos2)

In The Bikeriders , Kathy describes the arc of the couple’s relationship in a series of startling anecdotes and off-the-cuff reflections:

I’ve had nothin’ but trouble since I married Benny. I’ve seen more jails, been to more courts and met more lawyers, and it’s only a year. That’s a short time for so much to happen. Benny thinks that when you die, you’re better off than when you’re living. You know, like when his dad died, he said, “It’s just as well, he’s better off that way.” When his friends got killed, well, they’re better off that way. No feelings. I thought I could change him, you know? Every woman thinks that she can change a guy. Not to her own ways, but to be different. Not to be different, but to be, I don’t know. Like he’s wild. I used to think he’d get over that. But he don’t.

Lyon’s book features one photograph of Kathy. Sporting a dark beehive haircut with side-swept bangs, she stands in a bathroom with three mirrors, each reflecting her profile at a slightly different angle. In the main reflection, she looks directly at the camera, lips slightly parted, at ease but alert.

Benny, meanwhile, is an elusive figure. While Kathy describes him at length, he was never interviewed. The book features two photographs identified as him: One shows him gripping a pool table covered with ring stains; his head hangs between his shoulders, obscuring his face. The other captures him from behind on his motorcycle, wearing a “Chicago Outlaws” jacket and backlit by headlights.

Adapting The Bikeriders for the screen

The film adaptation, which debuts Friday, follows characters based on Kathy (played by Comer), who also narrates the story, and Benny (Butler). Some scenes play out just as the anecdotes in the book, such as the pair’s first meeting. Kathy is at a bar with a friend when she notices Benny, who is leaning against a pool table in a nearly perfect recreation of Lyon’s photo. Here, though, he looks up. We see his face, hear his voice and find out what happens next.

Ahead of the movie premiere, Lyon heard from a man named Kirk: Kathy and Benny’s son. He learned that Kathy had died, but Benny was living in Florida. “So I call Benny up,” Lyon tells the Telegraph . “We have a great talk. He’s totally upbeat. And then he says, ‘Hey, you know the picture of me at the pool hall?’ I said, yeah. He says, ‘It’s not me.’ What? ‘Check out the tattoos. It’s not me.’”

The movie is structured in two parts. The first half follows a group of misfits finding a family; much like Lyon’s book, it is meant to “glorify the life of the American bikerider.” As one of the club members, Brucie (Damon Herriman), says, “We don’t belong nowhere else, so we belong together.” The second half is a darker meditation on the dangers of outlaw life. As members of a younger generation join up, they introduce a newfound aggression and propensity for cruelty.

“[The violence] in the second half is fairly cruel, and that’s the important part,” Nichols tells PA Media . “If you just have the first hour, this would be a film glamorizing violence. Nobody wants that, nobody needs that, the world doesn’t need that. If you take the two parts as the whole, I think it says, ‘Here are the consequences of choosing to live this kind of life.’”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Benjamin Nichols (@benlucero74)

The book does not feature this second chapter. But while Lyon has retained an affection for the outsider spirit—“I like rebels and think they are intrinsic to the survival of our democracy,” he told the Chicago Reader in 2014—his views have evolved with time.

By the end of his stint with the Outlaws, Lyon was already growing disillusioned with the group. As he said to the Observer , he remembers getting into a “big disagreement with this guy who rolled out a huge Nazi flag as a picnic rug to put our beers on. By then, I had realized that some of these guys were not so romantic after all.”

What became of the Outlaws

Today, more than 300 outlaw motorcycle gangs operate across the United States. According to the Department of Justice , which defines the groups as “organizations whose members use their motorcycle clubs as conduits for criminal enterprises ,” the Outlaws have some 1,700 members in more than 100 chapters around the world. The club has engaged in criminal activities such as “arson, assault, explosives, extortion, fraud, homicide, intimidation, kidnapping, money laundering, prostitution, robbery, theft and weapons violations.”

The real Outlaws are “certainly aware of the film,” Nichols tells the Globe and Mail , but he has not had any contact with them. In the film, the club is called the Vandals, a fictional name intended to distance the project from existing groups, which the director had no desire to portray on screen. “If I’m being completely honest, I’m not really interested in contemporary biker culture,” he adds. “I was interested in the people in Danny’s book.”

Besides, Lyon believes the two groups have little in common. The people he knew in the 1960s were quite different from today’s biker types, whom he notices in connection with news events like the January 6 insurrection . Instead, the photographer tells A Rabbit’s Foot , the closest analogues are perhaps “the Cheyenne River and Standing Rock Sioux fighting the oil pipeline and the catastrophe of climate change.”

Today’s Outlaws appear to have an internet presence, albeit a limited one. One website, belonging to the Outlaws M.C. , instructs, “Everything is done face to face NOT online DO NOT write us asking how to join! Find an Outlaw and ask him!” Another site, belonging to the Outlaws M.C. World , features an article titled, “What is [an] Outlaw M.C. one-percenter today?” “To say that one-percenters are criminals or people of a lesser moral code than the rest of society is a tainted opinion,” the pseudonymous author argues. “We may not live by the rules of society, but we do live by its laws.”

Another language quibble: “Bikerider” is not a word, strictly speaking. It does not appear in the dictionary. According to Lyon, it is a word that once held a narrow definition, describing a subculture as it existed at a specific time and place.

“Back then in Chicago, they had a lot of names for things, names that were of the Midwest, and of that city, words belonging to that place and to the people who lived there,” wrote Lyon in the 1997 preface. “One of those words was bikeriders . No one there ever called them motorcyclists . The machines were called bikes , and the riders were called bikeriders . The word biker was simply never used in the Midwest by anyone at that time.”

After finding a publisher for the book, a copy editor explained that the title would need to be two words: The Bike Riders . Lyon pled his case—and won. In the years that followed, he was aghast to see “biker” become widespread. “I even use it myself,” he wrote. “The term that I heard and loved, and used with such pride, has all but been forgotten.”

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Ellen Wexler is Smithsonian magazine’s assistant digital editor, humanities.

DOI: 10.1016/j.jagp.2024.06.002
Corpus ID: 270543643

Commentary on Differential psychological treatment effects in patients with late-life depression and a history of childhood maltreatment

J. C. Nelson , Kevin L. Delucchi
Published in The American journal of… 1 June 2024
Psychology, Medicine

7 References

Developing clinically relevant decision tree models using machine-learning to predict psychotherapy success in late life depression, cognitive behavioral therapy for late-life depression (cbtlate): results of a multicenter, randomized, observer-blinded, controlled trial, a systematic review and meta-analysis of psychotherapy for late-life depression., a meta-analysis of cognitive-behavioural therapy for adult depression, alone and in comparison with other treatments, childhood maltreatment predicts unfavorable course of illness and treatment outcome in depression: a meta-analysis., differential responses to psychotherapy versus pharmacotherapy in patients with chronic forms of major depression and childhood trauma, lifetime history of sexual abuse, clinical presentation, and outcome in a clinical trial for adolescent depression., related papers.

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Luke Combs cries while talking about how he missed the birth of his son Beau

Country star Luke Combs is opening up for the first time about missing the birth of his son Beau .

In August 2023, Combs, 34, was on tour in Sydney, Australia, — a 20-hour flight away his home in Nashville, Tennessee — when he woke up to a text from his then-pregnant wife, Nicole. She was in labor and on her way to the hospital.

“It said, ‘I’m so sorry, I really tried to not have the baby while you’re gone,’” Combs told Apple Music 1 host Zane Lowe .

“And God, dude, it sucked,” the singer added.

Through tears, Combs revealed that Beau arrived two and a half weeks early, and he stills blames himself for not being there.

“I was supposed to be home and I wasn’t,” he said. “That was real hard.”

Luke Combs and Nicole Combs attend the 66th GRAMMY Awards in Los Angeles, California.

Combs said he didn’t sing about Beau’s birth “too much” in his new album, “Fathers & Sons,” because “it’s really hard for me to deal with.” He described Beau’s birth as “one of the best and worst days” in his life.

Nicole wasn’t alone in the delivery room. Combs shared that she was joined by her mother and sister.

“My wife had a really great support system with her for that experience, which I’m very thankful for,” he said. “That made it a lot easier. I had people with me, everything went great. No hiccups in the process or anything.”

Combs noted that he got to “see him be born (on video), which was awesome.” The singer did not say if he watched in real time.

“It’s a defining moment in my life for sure. It sums up, in a lot of ways, some of the bad parts of the music business — the leaving, and your schedule’s crazy and you’re traveling all over the place,” he said. “It’s not like I can drop everything I’m doing and fly 18 hours home.”

Combs and Nicole are also parents of 2-year-old son, Tex.

Rachel Paula Abrahamson is a lifestyle reporter who writes for the parenting, health and shop verticals. Her bylines have appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and elsewhere. Rachel lives in the Boston area with her husband and their two daughters. Follow her on Instagram .

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Interview with Rachel Nadon, CIRM's BMO 2024 postdoctoral fellow

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It was a busy spring for Rachel Nadon! On April 2nd, she began her stay as the BMO Posdoctoral Fellow at CIRM for the year 2024 , and on July 1st, she will take up her new position as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Québec Literature in the Département de littérature, théâtre et cinéma at Université Laval! Despite her short stay with us, we are eager to find out more about her fascinating research project, which she hopes to pursue as a professor.

But first and foremost, a brief biography is in order. With a PhD in French-language literatures from Université de Montréal, Rachel Nadon works on the relationship between emotions and the sensational press. Member of the Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec (GRÉLQ) , she works at the crossroads of cultural studies and literary history. She co-edited the collective Relire les revues québécoises : histoire, formes et pratiques (PUM, 2021). She is also director of Mens : revue d’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle .

Her research project as a BMO Postdoctoral Fellow, which she plans to pursue, is “Emotions and archives of feelings: reading Montreal through Allô Police, 1970-2004”.

The question on everyone's mind: why Allô Police?

I've already been working on yellow newspapers for a few years ("yellow newspapers", just to get everyone on the same wavelength, is an expression that includes all sorts of different newspapers, crime papers, gossip papers, saucy cartoon papers, etc.). These are newspapers that are often ephemeral, that don't last long and whose circulation is difficult to evaluate. Allô Police had a very long life, from 1953 to 2004. It also had a huge circulation, between 100,000 and 200,000 copies a week in the 1950s. So, on the one hand, there's the duration and popularity of this newspaper.

And on the other, I have noticed that everyone has one or more anecdotes about Allô Police. When I was a kid, my parents used to cover my eyes a little when we passed the Allô Police in the convenience store! But just about everyone has something to say about Allô Police: reading it only on vacations (like a little party), cutting it up for scrapbooking, reading it on the sly, despite parental prohibitions, etc. It is this conjecture of two elements that intrigues me: its popularity, the widespread yet almost intimate nature of its reading. Although few people mention Allô Police as a legitimate reading habit...

What motivates you to study the relationship between emotions and the sensational press?

When I started reading Allô Police, I realized that emotion was quite important in my reading. I was confronted with articles about mutilated and decapitated people; there were lots of photos of corpses. Itis something that really grabbed me, and which seems to me to go beyond the notion of sensationalism. Starting from my emotions of fascination and disgust, and perplexity too, I came to pay attention to the texts, to the way emotions like fear, disgust, even love, were named. I realized that all this, the mobilization of emotion in different ways, was part of the reading pact of these newspapers. I should point out that my reading emotions are probably not the same as those of another readership, that of the 1950s for example; I cannot assume that, at least!

What are your goals and expectations for your residency as a postdoctoral fellow at CRIEM?

The project is structured in two parts. First, I will be reading copies of Allô Police from the 1976 Olympics to the end of the newspaper's activities in 2004. I'm particularly interested in the 1980s and 1990s, because I want to see how the paper stages the city. For example, what neighborhoods are named, what events are covered? Does it resemble the years I've already studied (the 1950s-1960s)? I will be able to pursue these questions, analyzing the ways in which the city of Montréal is constructed over the course of the articles. I am also going to see how a newspaper like Allô Police situates itself in relation to the pro-sex and anti-sex feminist movements, and everything to do with pornography and sex work. As it's a newspaper that makes a living out of sexuality and its particular circles, I'm interested.

There's a second aspect to the project, that of archives. I want to explore people's memories of this diary, with the idea of reconstructing an archive of readings, or rather an "archive of feelings", to use Ann Czetkovich 's words. The aim is to seek out stories, objects of all kinds, business cards, photocopied editions, photos, scrapbook pages made from Allô Police clippings, etc. This will be a good way to reflect on the different uses of the newspaper and the ways in which people interacted with Allô Police, but also on the memories they retain of it and what it tells us about a way of living in or representing Montréal. It goes beyond a simple "broadcast-reception" type of reading, I want to touch on the uses of the newspaper and its ways of circulating, and of "orienting" us in the city.

Can you explain the concept of the archive of feelings?

Ann Czetkovich is interested in the experience of trauma among lesbian and queer people. According to her, this experience isn't "officially" documented, but is associated with objects or narratives. These objects - it could be a diary or pulp collections - are not necessarily linked to the experience of trauma, but evoke it in different ways for someone or for a community. These objects, figures or photos (for example), are invested with sentimental value and meaning, but they are not considered archives in the institutional sense of the term. Ann Czetkovich, in her book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , analyzes these archives and "produces" them, too. There is a double movement of analysis and creation (she "constitutes" cultural productions as archives, so to speak), and that is what I want to do too. Does the experience of emotionally reading a newspaper like Allô Police produce an archive of feelings? I would like to collect objects and stories that would enable us to reflect on the relationship between emotions, memory and the city.

This implies creative work.

For the project, I'd like to set up a website, collect alternative archives of Allô Police, meet people who still remember it, and explore different modes of distribution, such as fanzines. I have co-written a "detective serial" in the cultural magazine Liberté, in which I've used the device of fiction to integrate interviews I have already done with Allô Police actors. I'm also thinking of organizing a round-table discussion on the 20th anniversary of Allô Police's demise.

For me, in this project, there is a dimension of research and creation in the strict sense, i.e. reading and research on the one hand, and "reconstituting" the archives on the other. More broadly, it allows me to reflect on the question of archives, which is a complicated one when it comes to large-scale cultural productions. The documents that bear witness to the production of these periodicals are often not intended for conservation or archiving. In fact, the product itself - the newspaper - was never intended for preservation!

Why is it important to study a crime news journal like Allô Police?

On the one hand, it is a place of memory, in the sense of a space of memory that bears witness to many events affecting Montreal and many other places. This place of memory allows us to read the watermark of changes affecting society, but also relationships between people, the way we conceive of crime and criminals. In short, it allows us to reflect on what affects people, and what constitutes an era. And at the same time, it is a place of memory in the most fundamental sense: people remember it. Many readers meet there. It's important to highlight how a newspaper that has had bad press has brought together a community of readers, a community that could be reconstituted by, among other things, the very diverse uses to which this newspaper has been put.

What are your plans for your first months (or rather first years!) as an assistant professor of Québec literature?

One thing is for sure: I want to pursue this project! It is very close to my heart. I am interested in pursuing all these reflections on how a tabloid newspaper like Allô Police has left an emotional, concrete and material mark on people's lives and on the city of Montréal. More broadly, I have a project on the cultural history of bad taste in Québec; to be continued, as they say!

A perfect day in Montréal? It's summer, I get on my bike, I go swimming in Parc Jarry, I have a coffee in the Mile End and we eat hot dogs at Orange Julep.. 3 essential symbols of Montréal? Olympic Stadium, Caffè Italia and Milano (together), and the Lachine Canal Favorite neighborhood? My neighborhood, Little Italy, because of my neighbors! Bibliography on emotions and cultural & literary studies: Sara Ahmed (2014), Cultural Politics of Emotion , Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press,2 nd ed., 256 p. Ann Czetkovich (2003), An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures , Duke University Press, 368 p. Michel de Certeau (1990), L’invention du quotidien, tome 1 : Arts de faire , Folio, 416 p. Richard Hoggart (1970), La Culture du pauvre , trad. de l’anglais par Jean Claude Passeron, Paris, Minuit, 420 p. Will Straw (2021), «The Pastness of Allo Police» , dans Martha Langford et Johanne Sloan (ed.), Photogenic Montreal: Activisms and Archives in a Post-Industrial City, Montréal, McGill/Queen’s University Press, p. 199-216.

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