The author, a science writer, keeps orbiting the topic of moving beyond Darwin:
How did life originate? Scientists have been studying the question for decades, and they’ve developed ingenious methods to try to find out. They’ve even enlisted biology’s most powerful theory, Darwinian evolution, in the search. But they still don’t have a complete answer. What they have hit is the world’s most theoretically fertile dead end…
Krakauer shares many of Schrödinger’s views. He thinks that there are many forms of life – that Hamlet, for example, is alive, and that computer viruses and cultural networks might rightly be considered life forms, too. He also thinks that we don’t yet understand the principles of life. I asked Krakauer whether he thought that Schrödinger, in these closing reflections, was a mystic or provocateur or something else. He said that Schrödinger was interested in understanding consciousness and that he wasn’t being mystical with his suggestions. As Krakauer explained: ‘Schrödinger was struggling to find the principles that would unify cultural evolution with organic evolution.’ In short, he, too, was seeking broader principles of life.
When we look at the work in origins of life from the time of Darwin on, we see that the field is astonishingly resilient – perhaps not unlike the emergent life systems that it studies. When it hits a dead end, it spontaneously reconceives of itself. The theoretical frameworks that animate its research have adapted Darwin’s thinking in myriad ways, and now they’re moving beyond Darwin into new theoretical frames.
Natalie Elliot, “Origin story” at Aeon
Her survey of the scene suggests that researchers are moving beyond Darwin in a variety of different directions. Not clear how they will all meet up…