Synbiogenesis: An Alternative Hypothesis to Abiogenesis
Not a proven theory
Since even lots of professors seem to be unhappy with the college bureaucracies and I don’t intend to treat this like a proven theory, I figured I would just post it on the Internet and see what merits it can stand on. This is an idea I’ve had for a few years even though I’ve developed it a little more over time. What I think I really need to do with it next is try to work out some equations if I can. If you’re interested feel free to do that yourself as well.
A hypothesis I had some years ago was that I don’t believe in abiogenesis, but not because I believe in the God of the gaps theory or that life was self-willed into existence or whatever common reasons. When you look at physical descriptions of life, Schrödinger described life as negentropy. The two components to negentropy are intelligence and energy. Intelligence in this context is something like DNA, and then you need to put energy into it and you get life. That definition also seems to pretty clearly define viruses as not alive, because they don’t have energy, they just change the DNA structure but they don’t consume anything which makes them very clearly not organisms and almost more like prions which everyone agrees aren’t alive. Biologists mostly agree viruses aren’t organisms but biologists are using a very in my opinion longwinded definition of organism that isn’t understood by many people.
What I think happened is first you have all your atoms and elementary particles. I think a lot of what was necessary to build life was subatomic reactions themselves and that’s why you really only see organic molecules in space coming from nebulas and to a lesser extent stars. I don’t think there ever was some primordial soup like life came out of a tar pit after it underwent a lot of chemical reactions, though this is just my hypothesis, I just see it as the null hypothesis and I see no reason to believe that life came from non-life via chemical reactions whatsoever. I don’t think I’ve proven my hypothesis, but it makes way more sense to me than all the other hypotheses which have failed. I think when you have a nebula or a star doing nuclear fusion in space, what happens is there are energy waves moving around and this provides the energy component of life, while all the electromagnetic fields provide the intelligence component for proto-life.
So both parts of life originally most likely just come from electromagnetic actions on subatomic particles in space. I think when either or both of those two components move away from particles, you get all the dead matter, and when both of them move into particles, you get living matter, and the complexity of both kinds of matter increases at the same time since energy moving away from some matter and into other matter happens symmetrically (but not in a way that makes an equal amount of living and dead matter, just that for one to happen the other has to happen by definition since that’s how waves work.) At no point is living matter generated from dead matter, because it’s all just generated from quantum stuff that doesn’t fit the definition of dead or living using Schrödinger’s idea because it’s undefined at that point, it only becomes defined when electromagnetic waves move through space. That’s why the characteristic of life is basically the same as the characteristic of light, which is that it changes, and why life is associated with light and death is associated with darkness more colloquially and philosophically even though people haven’t thought that out very much. It’s a wave and it propagates, just like you propagate plants and fungi and whatever other organisms you want to propagate if you’re cultivating them, and organisms propagated themselves before anyone ever thought to do that.
So, I think most likely, the reason no one can cause abiogenesis in a lab is because there’s no such thing as abiogenesis, but I’m not declaring it a sacred mystery or a profane mystery, I just think something else is happening instead. If you could create the same kinds of conditions that exist in in nebulae that caused all these organic molecules to form, you would probably end up with some kind of RNA or proto-RNA, and that plus all the kinds of organic molecules you see formed in nebulae and from stars (stars are probably more likely to make non-genetic organic molecules that are necessary but not as central, since stars burn nearly everything that’s actually in them but I read they made perylene molecules and esters and other really wild stuff a long time ago and supposedly space would smell like raspberries if you averaged out all the molecules because of all the random ethyl formate in space) would lead to primitive organisms in the right environments (maybe only planets or large moons, maybe bacteria or something could survive on asteroids and comets, but I’m suggesting panspermia either way.) I call this idea synbiogenesis because I think it makes no sense to talk of dead matter without alive matter using the biophysics definition and looking at how energy and information would propagate under the conditions of the formation of life, and thus the two must have came into existence at once under those conditions. Einstein always said he thinks God does not play dice with the Universe and I always want to add my personal intuition that I think God does not play billiards with the Universe either. This is also related to why I think the Universe as a whole is most likely actually an open system rather than the overwhelmingly common prevailing assumption that everything that exists must definitionally be a closed system and therefore subject to all three laws of thermodynamics and heading toward a heat death.
