Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

Origins

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Contact: Chris Kempes, Project Principal Investigator, ckempes@santafe.edu

Difference between revisions of "Origins:About"

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'''OVERVIEW'''
 
'''OVERVIEW'''
  
The SFI Adaptation, Aging, and the Arrow of Time (AAA) research theme seeks to transform our understanding of phenomena bearing on the “arrow of time” using fundamental complexity insights and tools. The concept of time pervades everything that we know about the physical and biological universe. However, adaptive phenomena cannot be trivially reduced to the simple timescale of physics and chemistry. In adaptive systems, aging is explicitly viewed as a consequence of information gain (adaptation) and information loss (entropy). This research theme will investigate both living and non-living systems, including connected subsystems that operate concurrently at different scales and rates.  
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Origins of life is a topic that has captured the attention of scientists from a diverse set of fields for nearly a century. It represents one of the most interdisciplinary scientific communities, spanning basic physics and chemistry, geochemistry, planetary sciences, biochemistry, evolutionary theory, and paleobiology. Furthermore, forward progress in addressing the underlying question requires not just that these fields participate, but that there are deep and meaningful exchanges of pertinent facts, concepts, and perspectives. In the past 50 years many distinct possibilities for the emergence and propagation of life have been put forward. While these proposals have been enlightening, they have also sparked deep debates, and there is a continuing need for the community to engage in constructive discourse across disciplinary boundaries.  
  
Examples of key questions that this project seeks to address include:
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We are also at a unique point in the biological, chemical, and geophysical sciences where many high-throughput methods, massive computational power, and exceptional instrument sensitivity are allowing us to explore large spaces of possibilities with ever-higher resolution and precision. These new techniques not only hold promise for elucidating the complex world of modern biological physiology, but are also searching the large space of possibilities for the origins of life, disentangling feasibility, and testing specific hypotheses. Yet at the same time a wide variety of scientists whose expertise and interests could greatly inform our understanding of origins of life do not participate in the field or recognize their connections to the topic.
  
a. Is aging of organisms and social systems an inevitable consequence of the physical
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The NSF RCN for Exploration of Life's Origins seeks to find greater synthesis amongst existing perspectives on the origins of life, identify and summarize the current frontier of the field, inspire new scientific collaborations, and to translate findings from origins of life research to the rest of the biological sciences.
processes of entropy production during adaptation? That is, does the creation of one
 
system imply the destruction of another system?
 
 
 
b. What are the key mechanisms of adaptation and aging and how are they coupled?
 
And is advanced age in one system required for adaptation of another?
 
 
 
c. Are there new structures that emerge to offset the gain and loss of function, such as
 
modularity, network connectivity, redundancy, and hierarchy?
 
 
 
d. Is the inflexibility of older systems a generic feature of tight coupling in regulatory
 
and control networks, and what are the mechanisms that engender this coupling in
 
physiology, ecology and technology?
 
 
 
e.      How do concurrent aging processes interact across scales of space and time,
 
including genetic, epigenetic, cellular, organismal, and ecological systems?
 
 
 
f.      What is the relationship between metabolic energy and biological information – can
 
excess metabolic energy be used to preserve information, hence youthfulness,
 
indefinitely?
 
 
 
g.      Are there simple data-based diagnostics that allow us to assay system age,
 
maladaptability, and adaptability, and can simple devices capture appropriate metrics
 
for a variety of settings?
 
 
 
h.      Can we develop intervention strategies to compensate for the evolution or loss of system function with time, to include compensation through collective effects, social
 
support, and technology building on control theory?
 
 
 
i.      Can we predict and control catastrophic shifts in system function, to include shifts in
 
the neural, cognitive, and behavioral correlates of age, and what are the early warning
 
signs of these transitions?
 
 
 
j.     How do infectious processes age and what is the relationship of the swift adaptation
 
of microbes to their long-term persistence or extinction, and how is this coupled to
 
aging of the immune system?
 
 
 
k.      How do institutions and social norms remain adaptive and what are the mechanisms
 
through which they lose or preserve flexibility through time?
 
 
 
l.      How do technologies age, to include physical infrastructure, solid-state hardware,
 
and software, and can these processes be overcome?
 
 
 
'''RESEARCH THEME STRUCTURE'''
 
 
 
Each year the program is bookended at the start by a General Conference (GC), and at the end by a Core Theory (CT) Conference. Application Area (AA) meetings that take place throughout the year are organized by topical area experts. The GC explores and integrates a number of topical areas of research connected to Complex Time, while the CT seeks to consolidate data sets and tools across AAs. Each year SFI will host an Advisory Board meeting to monitor and provide feedback on the program progress. The program also has funding to support visiting scientists to SFI who might want to collaborate with SFI resident scientists and or learn more about complexity science.
 
 
 
'''APPLICATION AREAS'''
 
 
 
As of July, 2018, the project supports the following Application Areas:
 
 
 
Aging Brain
 
 
 
Infectious Diseases
 
 
 
Population & Environment
 
 
 
Human Resilience
 

Revision as of 03:08, October 28, 2018

SFI Adaptation, Aging, Arrow of Time Research Theme (2017–2022)

Made possible with generous funding from the James S. McDonnell Foundation

OVERVIEW

Origins of life is a topic that has captured the attention of scientists from a diverse set of fields for nearly a century. It represents one of the most interdisciplinary scientific communities, spanning basic physics and chemistry, geochemistry, planetary sciences, biochemistry, evolutionary theory, and paleobiology. Furthermore, forward progress in addressing the underlying question requires not just that these fields participate, but that there are deep and meaningful exchanges of pertinent facts, concepts, and perspectives. In the past 50 years many distinct possibilities for the emergence and propagation of life have been put forward. While these proposals have been enlightening, they have also sparked deep debates, and there is a continuing need for the community to engage in constructive discourse across disciplinary boundaries.

We are also at a unique point in the biological, chemical, and geophysical sciences where many high-throughput methods, massive computational power, and exceptional instrument sensitivity are allowing us to explore large spaces of possibilities with ever-higher resolution and precision. These new techniques not only hold promise for elucidating the complex world of modern biological physiology, but are also searching the large space of possibilities for the origins of life, disentangling feasibility, and testing specific hypotheses. Yet at the same time a wide variety of scientists whose expertise and interests could greatly inform our understanding of origins of life do not participate in the field or recognize their connections to the topic.

The NSF RCN for Exploration of Life's Origins seeks to find greater synthesis amongst existing perspectives on the origins of life, identify and summarize the current frontier of the field, inspire new scientific collaborations, and to translate findings from origins of life research to the rest of the biological sciences.