The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth Quotes

“The actual structure of the life we know is deeply and pervasively anchored in the particularities of the periodic table. If one wishes to propose an abstraction of 'life' away from its chemical substrate, one should first consider seriously the depth of this embedding, and should ask, if the chemical particulars were removed, how much of the structure we think of as living would remain to be abstracted. This embedding, of course, is also the basis for belief that the emergence of life was heavily scaffolded in the structure of physical laws, and thus not an arbitrary and vastly improbable discovery.”
― Eric Smith, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere

“Just as functions within computer science, ecosystems must become first-class citizens in biology. First-class functions are not merely sequences of steps, but genuine entities, which can be passed as arguments to and from other functions in the same manner as other data types. Languages that support this concept have a fundamentally greater expressive power than those that relegate functions to the status of 'second-class citizens' relative to first-class 'data' objects. Biology needs an analogous expressive power in order to refer properly to the role of ecosystems as carriers of fundamental patterns, and as entities parallel to and in some ways superseding organisms.”
― Eric Smith, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere

“Information in evolution is usually associated with processes of adaptive change, because that is how we recognize that variation is possible ex ante but restricted ex post. The information in a unique and universal metabolism would be of a different kind, because it would preclude variation in the processes that permit structure to form at all. We will argue that this is the information carried in paths of least resistance. It is essential to the organization of the biosphere because only along these paths are the residual problems of robustness in a hierarchical system simple enough to have evolutionary solutions.”
― Eric Smith, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere

“Indirect inferences about causation can sometimes be drawn from the absence of variations in a comparative analysis. The lack of variation in certain features against a background of system-level change can suggest that these features are constrained or subject to strong evolutionary pressure against deviation. These are evolution's 'dogs that didn't bark,' immortalized in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes memoir Silver Blaze:
Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night time.
Holmes: That was the curious incident.”
― Eric Smith, The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere