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If you are at all interested in the origin of life and the role of energy therein, I cannot recommend any single source of knowledge more than the following paper as it has literally changed my life: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.20191/abstra... It is written by two of the most intelligent people I think I've ever come across, Eric Smith, who is an external professor at the Sante Fe Institute, and Harold Morowitz, who founded the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason. Both men work in very disparate fields. Morowitz was a specialist of biology, origin of life scenarios, and biochemistry while Smith is a (brilliant) physicist and chemist. However, together they have assembled an encompassing theoretical structure that I am confident will lead science for several decades, once it is gradually integrated into other fields of research - e.g., Jeremy England at MIT has looked at some of the same thermodynamic phenomena using statistical physics (great article on his work - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory...) Eric Smith actually did a video describing this work while at Sante Fe that is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw This is the first paragraph of the paper mentioned above: Life is universally understood to require a source of free energy and mechanisms with which to harness it. Re- markably, the converse may also be true: the continuous generation of sources of free energy by abiotic processes may have forced life into existence as a means to alleviate the buildup of free energy stresses. This assertion – for which there is precedent in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and growing empirical evidence from chemistry – would imply that life had to emerge on the earth, that at least the early steps would occur in the same way on any similar planet, and that we should be able to predict many of these steps from first principles of chemistry and physics together with an accurate understanding of geochemical conditions on the early earth. A deterministic emergence of life would reflect an essential continuity between physics, chemistry, and biology. It would show that a part of the order we recognize as living is thermodynamic order inherent in the geosphere, and that some aspects of Darwinian selection are expressions of the likely simpler statistical mechanics of physical and chemical self-organization. |
Other resources:
Bechtel (2010): Biological mechanisms: organized to maintain autonomy https://mechanism.ucsd.edu/research/bechtel.biologicalmechan...
Walker et al (2015): The informational architecture of a the cell http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.03877