How did nature discover its own laws—twice?

In an intriguing look at the origins of cognition and technology in nature, theoretical chemist Addy Pross is exploring how nature discovered its own laws twice--first unconsciously and later consciously.

Pross is a professor in the chemistry department at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His review paper appears in the journal Life, July 12. 

Pross characterizes nature as the "ultimate technologist--the supreme information theorist, polymer scientist, energy engineer, electrical engineer, operations manager, architect, systems chemist, photochemist, synthetic chemist, molecular biologist, to name just a few of nature’s wide-ranging capabilities."

"It is staggering to realize that every living thing is continually exploiting nature’s laws," Pross wrote. "And able to do so far more creatively than any human technologist, past or present, and most remarkably, in the case of simple life, they are doing so without those life forms even knowing that such laws exist."

Pross added "the evolutionary process" does the "incomprehensible" by developing the technological innovation of mind.  

In exploring in detail how the journey from mindless to mindful happened, Pross developed the concept of what he calls dynamic kinetic stability and its ability to couple with a capability to replicate. Together these ideas lead him to formulate a new principle that goes beyond the Second Law of Thermodynamics-- the persistence principle that "all material systems are driven toward more persistent forms."

Current Science Daily asked Pross about his background and how he came to examine the question of how nature discovered its own laws.

"I am a theoretical chemist and have been particularly fascinated by the process by which chemistry became biology," he said. "Uncovering the nature of that process is the mother of all chemical problems. How was it at all possible for inanimate matter--'dead' stuff '--to become alive? We still don't have the full answer, but we physical scientists are closing in on the problem."

Pross said that he wrote a popular science book on the topic, "What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology," in 2016, which sought to break new ground on the subject.

He took a less common way of approaching the question by looking at the technologies involved. 

"Part of the extraordinary non-life to life transformation involved matter becoming cognitive," he said. "In fact, becoming able to discover and take advantage of nature's fundamental laws. How was that at all possible? The origin of life question can also be asked in a different way. How was nature able to induce matter to become cognitive, to have an agenda and discover its own laws? As my article describes, nature discovered those laws twice."

Nature as a technologist

Pross noted that his article gives several examples.

"But a particularly striking one, not described in the article, is that of the newly discovered CRISPR gene-editing technology which was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry," he said. "Thanks to that technology, we humans can now edit the DNA molecule and seek new treatments for certain genetic diseases. Sickle cell disease, a serious genetic blood disorder, may be overcome by replacing the defective β-globin gene in the cell's DNA with the corresponding 'healthy gene.'"

"What is remarkable though," Pross said, "is that Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, the Nobel recipients, discovered that gene-editing technique by studying bacteria. Turns out that bacteria, as part of their immune system, routinely defend themselves against viral attack by DNA editing."

He added, "If a bacterium survives a particular viral attack, in order to defend itself against future attack, it inserts a piece of viral DNA from viral remnants into its own DNA as a stored `mug-shot' of that virus. It then uses the same DNA editing technology to chop the DNA of the attacking virus into two, thereby neutralizing it."

Pross' point is that "revolutionary CRISPR DNA editing technology, worthy of a Nobel prize, was actually rediscovered by Doudna and Charpentier. They learned it from bacteria that had 'discovered' it initially millions of years earlier."

Dynamic kinetic stability and dynamic kinetic chemistry

In describing the process of how cognitive life could have begun, Pross introduces the concept of dynamic kinetic chemistry. He elaborated on this new kind of chemistry and the challenges it poses:

"'Regular' chemistry is primarily governed by thermodynamic considerations. That just means that matter seeks to reach its most stable chemical state, much like balls rolling down a hill seek to reach the lowest point."

"But sometimes energetically unstable entities can be stable in a time sense, through continual energy and material input. A physical example of that situation is a water fountain. As long as power is supplied to the pump, the unstable state of the water fountain, in energy terms, can be maintained: The fountain is stable in time terms."

"Well, it turns out that chemical systems can behave in just that way. If material and energy are provided to certain chemical systems in the right way, they can be maintained over time even though they are unstable in energy terms. Accordingly, a new kind of chemistry has come to light--dynamic kinetic chemistry, the chemistry of dynamic chemical systems that are unstable energetically but are stable in time terms. They can be persistent and, what’s more, they can show the beginnings of cognition. That new kind of chemistry only came to light in 2010. A new dimension in chemistry!"

Pross commented that living things are already making extensive use of the concept. "What is remarkable is the fact that living things exploit this dynamic kinetic chemistry all the time. And by coupling that dynamic character with the kinetic power of replication, dynamic chemistry uncovers extraordinary capabilities--motility, transport, energy cycles. Life is a process -- a dynamic process -- and life chemistry, which seemed so different from regular chemistry suddenly begins to make sense. In fact, a feasible strategy for synthesizing a simple proto-life form has begun to open up. As we speak, chemists are working on this ultimate challenge."

Persistence principle

A key part of Pross' view is what he calls the persistence principle. He credits its origin to "Creation," a 2000 book written by Steve Grand. Grand, "a computer whiz, who proposed what he considered to be the `most important law of nature' that things that persist, persist, things that don’t, don’t."

"As Grand was not a physical scientist addressing physical scientists," Pross said, "his comment was largely overlooked, but his statement can be readily turned into a persistence principle that nature is driven toward persistent forms."

"Most satisfyingly, the principle is exquisitely logical, not just empirical," he added. "But the point is it turns out that such a logical principle underpins change in biology more usefully than the well-known Second Law of Thermodynamics. So evolution is just a manifestation of the persistence principle. The emergence of life from non-life is a further manifestation of the principle. The troubling chemistry-biology conceptual gap may finally be closing."