From: jimruttshow8596
Eric Smith, a researcher at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo, a faculty member at Georgia Tech’s Biology Department, and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), applies his background as a statistical physicist to understand complex systems across various fields [00:33:00]. His work spans the origins of life, the nature and origins of language, money and finance as institutions, evolutionary game theory, and ecosystem sustainability [01:13:00]. He is the author of “The Guidance of an Enterprise Economy” with Martin Shubik, and “The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere” with Harold Morowitz [01:23:00].
Origins of Life: A Physics Perspective
Smith’s interest in the origins of life stems from his background in high-energy physics, specifically his work on phase transitions [07:36:00]. He views biology through the lens of dynamical phase transitions, seeing living systems as “engines” [08:01:00]. His collaboration with Harold Morowitz at SFI was pivotal, as Morowitz sought to explain the “signatures of the biosphere” using laws of self-organization [08:18:00].
Metabolism First vs. Control First
The “metabolism first” hypothesis, which Morowitz championed, proposes that the fundamental laws of small molecule biochemistry were inherited from regularities in geochemistry [10:56:00]. These geochemical regularities were in place before the biosphere formed, and life basically structured itself around them [11:15:00]. The modern view of “metabolism first” suggests that the emergence of life was a cascade of events, beginning with increasingly organized states of geochemistry that set a template for biochemistry [11:20:00]. This template was then strong and simple enough to allow for the development of control structures like genes and the central dogma [11:52:00].
This contrasts with the “control first” or “RNA world” hypothesis, which attempts to map Francis Crick’s central dogma (control flowing from DNA to RNA to proteins) directly back to the origin of life [10:06:00]. In this view, RNA molecules are burdened with being both genotype and phenotype, which is chemically challenging [10:27:00].
The Biosphere as the Fourth Geosphere
Harold Morowitz’s insight was to view the biosphere as a “fourth geosphere,” akin to the atmosphere, hydrosphere (ocean), and lithosphere (solid Earth) [13:52:00]. Vernadsky, who coined the term geosphere, divided the planet into these three fundamental states of matter (gas, liquid, solid) [12:16:00]. Morowitz suggested that the biosphere is a new, dynamically defined state of matter with its own distinct rules, more integrated by its internal processes than by its exchanges with the other geospheres [13:58:00]. The origin of life is thus understood as something that happens to a planet, not just on it, representing a transition of multi-component, robust systems [15:10:10].
Where Life May Have Originated
Smith believes that subsurface water alteration zones, particularly at spreading centers underneath ocean basins where new crust is formed, are strong candidates for life’s origin [14:37:00]. These areas provide the necessary electron transfer potentials and catalytic environments [14:44:00]. The Earth itself is seen as a battery, with electron flow from the deep bulk to the atmosphere, driven by the sun splitting water [17:33:00]. This “mild chemistry” at rock-water interfaces, unlike the violent chemistry of UV light, more closely resembles biochemistry [18:51:00].
Key to this process is catalysis, as low-energy chemistry requires it [19:10:00]. Smith highlights the citric acid cycle as a central organizing principle in biochemistry, forming the foundation for synthesizing everything from eleven small organic acids [19:39:00]. Acetic acid is the central molecule for carbon fixation in the biosphere, and pyruvic acid appears to be the central molecule for the start of everything complicated (e.g., amino acids) [20:21:00]. These core “linchpins” are circumstantial evidence for where to focus the search for small molecule chemistry in the origin of life [20:55:00].
Autocatalysis and Non-Equilibrium Systems
For dynamic stability, as seen in the biosphere, persistent patterns must continually renew themselves [21:42:00]. This is achieved through autocatalysis, where processes concentrate general environmental material into specific outputs that then facilitate further conversion of environmental components into the same material [22:31:00]. Autocatalytic cycles are prevalent in biochemistry, allowing it to remain integrated and purified [23:01:00].
This concept differs from Stu Kauffman’s work in that Kauffman starts from unstructured, combinatorial mediums, relying on laws of large numbers for feedback in large networks [23:13:00]. Smith emphasizes that biochemistry is a highly structured medium, and understanding collective effects within this structure is a leading edge of research [23:36:00].
Living systems are fundamentally far from equilibrium, requiring constant energy flow [24:15:00]. Energy flow allows a system to couple to boundary conditions that are out of equilibrium with each other, providing more “information” that restricts the system’s freedom, leading to more ordered states [25:58:00]. This aligns with Harold Morowitz’s view that “the flow of energy through a system tends to organize the system” [27:15:00]. However, Smith suggests that the concept of thermodynamics needs to be even more radical, extending to the “thermodynamics of rule-based systems” and chemical reaction networks as systems in their own right, moving beyond the limitations of equilibrium state variables [28:00:00].
Challenges and Frontiers
Research into the origin of life involves “little islands” of knowledge where specific information is available, such as core biochemistry (citric acid cycle, carbon fixation) and the ribosome (history of RNA and early peptides) [28:56:00]. However, the connections between these islands are largely unknown [29:02:00]. The genetic code, for instance, is seen not as an assignment problem, but as reflecting the integrated process of life becoming energetically active and discovering how to fold [30:39:00].
A major challenge is how high-fidelity information transfer systems, like DNA with its complex error correction, could have arisen from chemical evolution prior to their existence [32:11:00]. Drawing on Herbert Simon’s work on complex systems architecture, Smith suggests that emergence relies on integral error correction in subsystems, creating stable intermediate states that serve as platforms for further assembly [33:17:00]. An example in biology is “substrate-assisted catalysis” in RNA and DNA reactions, where the nucleic acid molecule itself defines most of the catalytic context, requiring simpler surrounding environments [36:12:00]. This simpler catalysis could have enabled the memory systems to become more complicated [36:57:00].
The next frontier is to learn how to explore chemistry effectively [37:12:00]. Chemistry is a vast combinatorial system that current methods struggle to search systematically. New methods are needed to reason about incomplete claims in highly complicated processes with long histories [37:15:00]. Deep learning and machine learning might offer potential solutions for discovering pathways and optimizing them within chemical systems [38:33:00].
Ecosystem Sustainability: Scaling Solutions
Smith’s work on ecosystem sustainability is rooted in collaborations concerning agriculture and medicine [13:38:00]. The core question is how small-scale solutions in areas like perennial polyculture, soil microbial ecology, diversified cropping, and plant-animal mutualisms can scale to a large, interconnected world [15:16:00]. While local understanding is profound and essential for complex problems, interconnected entities like watersheds or continents necessitate large-scale coordination [15:41:00].
A key challenge is leveraging small-scale understanding to support it from a big system, while simultaneously constraining the big system by feeding from locally acquired knowledge [16:01:00]. This highlights a fundamental problem in complex systems: how to create hierarchical or emergent entities with multiple levels that cohere in real-time, despite operating on multi-scales simultaneously [18:39:00]. The human body, with its billions of autonomous cells bound by astounding homeostasis, serves as an example of a system holding itself together coherently across multiple scales [18:52:00].
The issue of control systems in hierarchical structures is critical: controllers must be able to influence the controlled, but they are not immediately subject to feedback, potentially leading to wrong instructions for too long [17:33:00]. This problem manifests in business, economics, social order, and democracy [18:04:00]. The overarching question is how to understand and improve our approach to these systemic failures [18:27:00].
A current focus is the “mezzo scale” – communities of hundreds to a few thousand people – which historically provided much of life’s structure, but has ceded ground to governments and markets [21:50:00]. The challenge is to revitalize this scale. Smith suggests that understanding China’s governance, which distrusts and weakens the mezzo scale in favor of centralized control, could provide insights into solving problems at various institutional scales [22:23:00].
Current Work
Eric Smith’s current research continues at the interface of organized geochemistry and the deep origins of biology [01:23:59]. He is delving more into the folding of biopolymers and the origin of the genetic code [01:24:07]. His meta-question revolves around how biological systems achieve their extraordinary capacity to carry information [01:24:29]. He notes that physics typically deals with combinatorial state spaces that are “relatively flat” (physically neutral), allowing weak forces like selection to drive migration [01:24:40]. However, chemistry is heterogeneous, making such flatness atypical [01:25:12]. To understand why biospheres are possible, one must identify “linchpin steps” – small chemical problems that create narrow bottlenecks, rejecting configurational entropy and yielding combinatorial, flat spaces capable of carrying information [01:25:36]. This is a key area where physics and biology can productively interface [01:26:29].