Dr. Lynn Rothschild, NASA

Replaying the Table of Life: The Potential of Evolution as a Predictive Science

RiboEvo Special Seminar

The origin and evolution of life on earth seems capricious, based on the quirks of contingency. Celebrated by Stephen Jay Gould, “evolution by contingency” lacks the predictive. Not necessarily so, replied Simon Conway Morris, for convergence reassures us that certain evolutionary responses are replicable suggesting evolutionary ease for terrestrial life. The outcome of this debate is critical to Astrobiology. How can we understand where we came from on Earth without guidelines? More important, we cannot design a strategy for the search for life elsewhere - or to hypothesize what the future will hold for life on Earth and beyond and thus act on this knowledge - without assuming that evolution has predictable components. Yet our primary source of data is historical rather than experimental, and biology is a statistical proposition so predictions will never have the deterministic certainty of Newtonian physics.

I hypothesize that there are biological patterns likely to be universal based on the prevalence of organic chemistry in comets, meteorites and the interstellar medium, the widespread occurrence of water, and the universality of the laws of chemistry and physics. Evolution is subject to natural selection, the constraints of an ancestry, genetics, and developmental biology. This amalgam creates a surprising amount of predictive power in the broad outline. From these we hypothesize that life is always carbon-based, and generally similar to that on Earth. Based on what we know about the origin and evolution of life on Earth, there are certain tendencies, if not “laws”, that provide predictive power.

For more information contact Prof. Loren Williams (404-894-9752).