New physics needed to probe the origins of life

To me, this passage epitomizes why I am not convinced by Kauffman's claim that we need new physics:

"The question of whether there is a physics of life demands that we consider that all examples of life might at their core be part of the same fundamental phenomenon; otherwise, ‘life’ is not an objective property, but a collection of special cases... but conventional approaches to life’s origins — such as the ‘RNA world’ and other genetics-first models — cannot yet be formulated [as something like a physical law]. That is because they make many assumptions on the basis of properties that might be unique to the chemistry of life on Earth, such as that RNA is necessary to life’s origins."

Kauffman starts from the position that he wants life to be a unified ontological category, rather than a collection of special cases, but, for the sake of argument, what if it isn't the former? That would not rule out science[1] describing, analyzing and explaining it as the latter - it would just mean that Kauffman's intuitions would be mistaken.

Stephen Jay Gould, wearing his historian-of-science hat, wrote several articles about various examples of pre-, proto- and pseudo-scientific world models, each of which tried to fit the diversity of life into a preconceived grand scheme. Linnaeus et. al. took a radically different approach, in which they abandoned (or, at least, de-emphasized) preconceived schemes, and, working from the bottom up, based their taxonomy on a detailed examination of the physiological similarities and differences between organisms. The unifying theory for this taxonomy was found later, in the form of a theory of evolution, and the taxonomy undoubtedly helped develop the theory.

So let's put aside dreams of a unified theory, and see if we can understand just the origin of life on earth. If there is a grand theory, this would help find it.

[1] I wrote 'science', not 'physics', because I don't think the reduction of biology to physics is often useful. Take theories of evolution, for example: they are not reductionist, and a reduction of the history of life on earth to the underlying physics would not provide a better explanation.

Note: the title is not the conclusion or the content of the article. The article attempts to be less dismissive to some of the direct claims of the author of a book a comment on which the article is, and the title maybe corresponds to the content of the book which is "provocative" (but it can be the intervention of an editor too). And according to the article the book's logic is something like "because we don't have starting conditions we can't have formulas which would allow an exact derivation of how life evolves, therefore it's beyond physics."

But that doesn't mean that the evolution didn't happen exactly following the physical laws, only that you can't have "nice" formulas. But, realistically, nobody should expect "nice formulas." Not everything that happens can be reduced to a nice formula. The motion of two bodies due to the gravitation they have can be reduced to a nice formula since Newton. But the motion of three bodies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem

"Unlike two-body problems, no closed-form solution exists for all sets of initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required."

Is it "beyond physics"? No. It's just "there's no nice formula." And if it's so hard only with three bodies, and considering the immense scale at which molecular events happen (atoms and molecules having their own laws of interaction which are simpler for two but again immensely more complex for more), of course not too much simplicity to predict everything together should be expected.

The article author also disagrees with the "beyond physics" formulation.

"New" physics in the language of the physicists means specifically "the new particles which don't fit to our existing theory." And "the scale of the known interactions is too big for nice formulas" doesn't lead to that. So the claims of "new physics" in the article are simply "non sequitur." No new particles are needed.

"Stuart Kauffman’s provocative take" sounds a lot like vitalism. Which is where many go when they can't find simplistic explanations. Such as, for example, Hans Driesch, when embryos didn't respond as expected to experimental manipulation. But then Alan Turing came along.[0]

So anyway, "new physics" is arguably a cop out.

0) https://www.nature.com/articles/482464a.pdf?origin=ppub

Kauffman is the originator of Boolean networks[1], a particularly interesting computational view of biology.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_network

Is an interesting counterpoint to idea being worked on by Jeremy England that there is an underlying organising mechanism leading to life that is inherent within thermodynamics - Statistical Physics of Adaptation by Nikolai Perunov, Robert Marsland and Jeremy England - https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1875

Jack Szostak does a pretty good job of outlining how life might have arisen. It’s less mysterious than it intuitively might seem:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PqPGOhXoprU

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5jh33OiOA

Why do we need physics in the first place, to explain life? Shouldn't chemistry be enough?