All day
The origin of life remains one of science’s most profound mysteries. Nearly a century after the onset of molecular biology, the processes of ‘normal science’ (in the Kuhnian sense) appears no closer to an answer. This stasis suggests that understanding the origin of life might require radical new thinking, perhaps even entirely new physics laws and new philosophy. Assembly theory (AT) is a theoretical and experimental framework intended to fill the gaps in contemporary approaches by building new conceptual foundations that could unlock new roads to progress. AT’s conceptual foundations include a description of a new physics in which novelty, contingency and the potential for open-endedness are fundamental, and determinism is emergent along assembled lineages, with empirically testable consequences.
This meeting is intended to bring together a diverse group of scholars, including physicists, chemists, biologists, computer scientists, philosophers and historians to interrogate the current state of the science and philosophy of assembly theory and to map out future directions, including advancing theory and allowing new experimental and observational tests. Topics to be discussed include testable insights into the universality of evolution and selection beyond biology; contrasting AT’s ontology and philosophy for emergence and causation against alternative paradigms; illuminating the schism between computation and physical reality; mechanisms for novelty and an open, creative future; and inquiry to the physics of the actual and the possible. The central aim of the meeting is to scope out whether this approach allows defining a new frontier for origin of life science.