What are the origin and routes of evolution of the enormous hierarchical complexity of life that has no precedence in inanimate matter? Arguably, this is the ultimate question of evolutionary biology if not of biology as a whole. Then, to understand the origin of life with its complexity, a more general, envelope theory is required, perhaps, one that amounts to new physics explaining evolution and emergence of complexity across all scales in the universe, with life being a special case of this universal evolution. I argue that such a theory can be developed at the nexus between evolutionary biology, theory of learning, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The key concept for explaining the emergence and evolution of complexity is multilevel learning. I will formulate 7 fundamental principles of evolution that appear to be necessary and sufficient to render a universe observable and show that they entail the major features of biological evolution, including replication of genetic material and natural selection. These cornerstone phenomena of biology emerge from the fundamental features of learning dynamics, such as the existence of a loss function, which is minimized during learning. I will then sketch the general theory of evolution using the mathematical framework of learning in neural networks. To demonstrate the potential of the proposed theoretical framework, I will demonstrate how a generalized version of the Central Dogma of molecular biology can be derived by analyzing the flow of information during learning (back propagation) and predicting (forward propagation) the environment by evolving organisms. I then outline a phenomenological theory of evolution and origin of life by combining the formalism of classical thermodynamics with a statistical description of learning. Within this thermodynamics framework, major transitions in evolution, such as the transition from an ensemble of molecules to an ensemble of organisms, that is, the origin of life, can be modeled as a special case of bona fide physical phase transitions that are associated with the emergence of a new type of grand canonical ensemble and the corresponding new level of description. Finally, driving from these theoretical principles, I will outline a model of the origin of life in specific biological terms.
Eugene V. Koonin is an NIH Distinguished Investigator, the leader of the Evolutionary Genomics Group at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the NIH. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1978 and was awarded a PhD in Virology by the same university in 1983. Between 1983-1991, Dr. Koonin was a researcher in the Institute of Poliomyelitis of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, and later, a Senior Researcher and a Laboratory Chief at the Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He joined the NIH as a Visiting Scientist in 1991, became a Senior Investigator in 1996 and an NIH Distinguished Investigator in 2019.
Dr. Koonin’s research focuses on genome evolution, especially in microbes and viruses, host-parasite coevolution, and more specifically, functions and evolution of antivirus defense systems, in particular, CRISPR-Cas. Dr. Koonin is the author of the concept and implementation of Clusters of Orthologous Genes which are central to comparative and evolutionary genomics. He developed computational approaches for the discovery of novel CRISPR-systems in genomic and metagenomic data and identified many new variants some of which are widely used as genome editing or RNA detection tools. Dr. Koonin’s work on virus evolution led to the development of a new global taxonomy of viruses that has been officially adopted by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses and is implemented in all leading biological databases including GenBank.
Dr. Koonin is the author of the 2011 book “The Logic of Chance” which outlines a new synthesis of Evolutionary Biology. He also develops mathematical models of various evolutionary process and works on general theory of evolution based on physical principles. Dr. Koonin has published about 1100 research and review papers, many in top scientific journals, that have been cited more than 250,000 times. His h-index is 241 according to Google Scholar. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, National Academy of Medicine of the USA, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Academy of Microbiology, a Foreign Associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization and Academia Europea, and a Doctor Honoris Causa of Universite Aix-Marseille and Wageningen University.
References
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30150...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35121...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35131...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36996...