Review and analysis of scientific research and theory bearing on knowledge of Earth’s protogeobiosphere, origins and evolution of protobiont complexity, and emergence of life in the cosmos.

Multidisciplinary scientific research on emergence of life and earth’s earliest biosphere has flourished in the past decade. The confluence of new ideas, technologies, and evidence in earth and planetary sciences, molecular cell biology, genomics and microbial phylogenetics, has spawned innovative analyses and new theoretical insight into the emergence and accretion of structural and functional complexity in living systems.

 

Scientific paradigms covering the origins of life in the cosmos are subtly shifting, providing a case study in how scientific theory develops. This website is a guided tour of the science, reviewing current open-source peer-reviewed publications, interpreting scientific evidence, and digesting discourse bearing on central enigmas in the quest to comprehend how life emerges on earth and other planets in the cosmos.

 

The documents linked here represent an “integrative study of the interactions within and between the physical, chemical, biological, geologic, planetary, and astrophysical systems as they relate to understanding how an environment transforms from nonliving to living and how life and its host environment coevolve.” The transdisciplinary science addressing the core problems “seeks to understand the web of interrelationships and feedbacks between time-variable planetary processes—both physical and chemical—and the proto-biological chemical and organizational dynamics that lead to the emergence and persistence of life.” (NASEM 2019)