Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report - Inria - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique
Journal Articles Life Year : 2021

Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report

André Ariew
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1116083
Pierrick Bourrat
Michael Lachmann
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1116086
Philippe Nghe
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1030342
Zorana Zeravcic
  • Function : Author
  • PersonId : 1116089

Abstract

Natural selection is commonly seen not just as an explanation for adaptive evolution, but as the inevitable consequence of “heritable variation in fitness among individuals”. Although it remains embedded in biological concepts, such a formalisation makes it tempting to explore whether this precondition may be met not only in life as we know it, but also in other physical systems. This would imply that these systems are subject to natural selection and may perhaps be investigated in a biological framework, where properties are typically examined in light of their putative functions. Here we relate the major questions that were debated during a three-day workshop devoted to discussing whether natural selection may take place in non-living physical systems. We start this report with a brief overview of research fields dealing with “life-like” or “proto-biotic” systems, where mimicking evolution by natural selection in test tubes stands as a major objective. We contend the challenge may be as much conceptual as technical. Taking the problem from a physical angle, we then discuss the framework of dissipative structures. Although life is viewed in this context as a particular case within a larger ensemble of physical phenomena, this approach does not provide general principles from which natural selection can be derived. Turning back to evolutionary biology, we ask to what extent the most general formulations of the necessary conditions or signatures of natural selection may be applicable beyond biology. In our view, such a cross-disciplinary jump is impeded by reliance on individuality as a central yet implicit and loosely defined concept. Overall, these discussions thus lead us to conjecture that understanding, in physico-chemical terms, how individuality emerges and how it can be recognised, will be essential in the search for instances of evolution by natural selection outside of living systems.
Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
72_Charlat_Life_2021.pdf (346.09 Ko) Télécharger le fichier
Origin Publisher files allowed on an open archive

Dates and versions

hal-03418757 , version 1 (08-11-2021)

Licence

Identifiers

Cite

Sylvain Charlat, André Ariew, Pierrick Bourrat, María Ferreira Ruiz, Thomas Heams, et al.. Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report. Life, 2021, 11 (10), pp.1051. ⟨10.3390/life11101051⟩. ⟨hal-03418757⟩
302 View
169 Download

Altmetric

Share

More