Emergence, Construction, or Unlikely? Navigating the Space of Questions regarding Life's Origins

Abstract

We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories: unlikely (life's origin was a chance event), construction (life's origin was a stepwise series of synthesis and assembly processes), and emergence (life was always an amalgam of many parallel processes from which the living state emerged as a natural outcome of physical driving forces). We critically examine some of the founding and possibly misleading assumptions in these categories. Such assumptions need not be detrimental to scientific progress as long as their limits are respected. We conclude by attempting to concisely state the most significant enigmas still remaining in the origins field and suggest routes to solve them.