Origins of Life, MOOC @ SFI’s Complexity Explorer

Lead instructors: Sarah Maurer and Chris Kempes

This course aims to push the field of Origins of Life research forward by bringing new and synthetic thinking to the question of how life emerged from an abiotic world.

This course begins by examining the chemical, geological, physical, and biological principles that give us insight into origins of life research. We look at the chemical and geological environment of early Earth from the perspective of likely environments for life to originate.

Taking a look at modern life we ask what it can tell us about the origin of life by winding the clock backwards. We explore what elements of modern life are absolutely essential for life, and ask what is arbitrary? We ponder how life arose from the huge chemical space and what this early ‘living chemistry’ may have looked like.

We examine phenomena, that may seem particularly life like, but are in fact likely to arise given physical dynamics alone. We analyze what physical concepts and laws bound the possibilities for life and its formation.

Insights gained from modern evolutionary theory will be applied to proto-life. Once life emerges, we consider how living systems impact the geosphere and evolve complexity. 

The study of Origins of Life is highly interdisciplinary – touching on concepts and principles from earth science, biology, chemistry, and physics.  With this we hope that the course can bring students interested in a broad range of fields to explore how life originated. 

The course will make use of basic algebra, chemistry, and biology but potentially difficult topics will be reviewed, and help is available in the course discussion forum and instructor email. There will be pointers to additional resources for those who want to dig deeper.

This course is a Complexity Explorer Frontiers Course.  The goals of a Frontiers Course are to share the excitement and uncertainty of a scientific area, inspire curiosity, and possibly draw new people into the research community who can help this research area take shape.

More at: www.complexityexplorer.org

Can Mutual Imitation Generate Open-Ended Evolution? Takashi Ikegami University Tokio

We only find open-ended evolution (OEE) in the development of human technology or in the evolution of life itself. The research on OEE at ALIFE aims to discover a mechanism that generates OEE automatically in a computer or machine. A potential mechanism and the conditions required have been discussed in three previous workshops. In this study, we propose and discuss man–machine interaction experiments as a new OEE mechanism. The pertinent definition of OEE here is whether we can continue to create new movements that are distinguishable to us. We consider the development of body movement patterns generated when Alter3 androids imitate each other and when Alter3 androids and humans imitate each other. We use UMAP contraction and transfer entropy to measure these changes and demonstrate that man–machine communication is far more dynamic and complex than the machine–machine interaction. We discuss how human subjects can engender OEE via communication with the android.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

Corruption Networks Concepts and Applications, Oscar M. Granados & José R. Nicolás-Carlock (Eds.)

Presents current theoretical, empirical, and operational efforts tackling corruption studies.
Introduces the relevance of evidence-based and network approaches to anticorruption.
Discusses the best ways to convert the obtained knowledge into public policy.

More at: link.springer.com