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Chemistry alone cannot explain the origin of life

By Paul Davies  /  The Guardian



However, that did not stop generations of scientists from investigating the puzzle.

The problem is, whatever took place happened billions of years ago, and all traces long ago vanished — indeed, we may never have a blow-by-blow account of the process. Nevertheless we may still be able to answer the simpler question of whether life’s origin was a freak series of events that happened only once, or an almost inevitable outcome of intrinsically life-friendly laws. On that answer hinges the question of whether we are alone in the universe.

Most research into life’s murky origin has been carried out by chemists. They have tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that is no surprise, given life’s stupendous complexity. Even the simplest bacterium is incomparably more complicated than any chemical brew ever studied.


DNA is described as a genetic “database,” containing “instructions” on how to build an organism. The genetic “code” has to be “transcribed” and “translated” before it can act. And so on. If we cast the problem of life’s origin in computer jargon, attempts at chemical synthesis focus exclusively on the hardware — the chemical substrate of life — but ignore the software — the informational aspect. To explain how life began we need to understand how its unique management of information came about.



Information theory has been extensively applied to biological systems at many levels, but rarely to the problem of how life actually began. Doing so opens up an entirely new perspective on the problem. Rather than the answer being buried in some baffling chemical transformation, the key to life’s origin lies instead with a transformation in the organization of information flow.

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