Michael Lachmann from the Santa Fe Institute will give a live talk on Wednesday, November 2 at 3 pm in the Salon.
If you would like to attend, please email to office@csh.ac.at.
Title: The origin of life and what we can learn from it
Abstract:
In his talk, he will outline three insights about the origin of life, and then discuss what we can learn today from these insights.
First, he will claim that selection can be applied outside of biological systems. This means that insights from evolutionary theory can be applied to other systems. Second, he will point out that we need to separate two concepts when we talk about what life is: what we are trying to explain when we talk about the origin of life and what we look for when we try to discover life. Third, he will try to disassemble the organism. None of us will ever replicate. Few things in biology do. Our children are not identical copies to their parents. We need to understand the action of evolution on entities that don’t replicate, but through which lineages of information flow. This view is somewhat akin to Richard Dawkins’ idea of the selfish gene, though also orthogonal to it. Once we thus disassemble the organism, evolution can be applied much more widely.