0271 What does biosemiotics have to say about abiogenesis, the origin of life from non-living matter?

0272 Two texts are before me.

0273 Semiotic Agency: Science Beyond Mechanism is written by biosemioticians Alexei Sharov and Morten Tonnessen.  Semiotic Agency is published in 2021 by Springer and logs in at volume 25 of Springer’s Series in Biosemiotics.  Series editors have Razie Mah’s permission for use of the following disquisition, with attribution of said blogger.

The text is open to chapter five, titled, “Origins of Life”, and is found on pages 123-149.  This chapter closes Part II of Semiotic Agency.  The title of Part II is “Agency in Organisms and Beyond.”

0274 Pathways to the Origin and Evolution of Meaning in the Universe is edited by Alexei Sharov and George Mikhailovsky (2024, Scrivener Press, Beverly MA).

The text is open to chapter nine, titled “Chemical Origins of Life, Agency and Meaning” (pages 189-210).  This chapter opens Part II, titled “Meanings in the Evolution of Life”.  The chapter’s author is Alexei Sharov.

0275 First and foremost, chemistry-based scenarios for the origins of life have proven futile.  Why?  For one, it is difficult to imagine a chemical system constituting a semiotic agent.  Sure, a biological agent can be reduced to a chemical soup, but a chemical soup cannot unreduced to a biological being.

Is this the reason why proposals of life emerging from a primordial soup consistently fail?

0276 The key word in the above paragraph is “emerging”.

0277 So why not turn to Mariusz Tabaczek, who writes two books, titled Emergence (2019) and Divine Action and Emergence (2021) that are reviewed in Razie Mah’s blog for April and May, 2024?  These and other examinations go into Razie Mah’s two-part e-book, Comments on Mariusz Tabaczek’s Arc of Inquiry (2019-2024), available at smashwords and other e-book venues.

0278 Tabaczek criticizes Terrence Deacon, even as he translates Deacon’s conceptual apparatus into a classical Aristotelian framework.  Why?  If Deacon borrows ideas from Aristotle and re-tools them for his own approach to emergent systems, then why not articulate Deacon’s approach using Aristotle’s terms?

0279 The answer turns out to be more than academic.

Recall the Positivist’s judgment for the natural sciences?

The noumenon (the thing itself) and the model (what ought to be for the empirio-schematic judgment) are two contending sources of illumination.  Deacon stands with the model, then uses modified versions of Aristotle’s vocabulary in order to project his model onto the noumenon.  In contrast, Tabaczek stands with the noumenon, where Aristotle’s terminology is at home.  He sees Deacon’s projection from the model back onto the noumenon and does not think too highly of the imposition.

0316 Oxygen gas is a byproduct of photosynthesis.  Over billions of years, the continual release of oxygen transforms the atmosphere of the Earth.

The ubiquity of oxygen gas in today’s atmosphere makes experimental research into the chemistry of the early Earthdifficult.  Today, the reaction that Sharov suggests, the oxidation of an alkane to a fatty acid, would require elaborate precautions.  Why?  Even a trace amount of oxygen would directly react with the light-absorbing pigment.

0317  So, what am I saying?

Well, research is difficult.

0318 Also, as soon as one gets to the earliest forms of life on Earth, such as photosynthetic prokaryotes, the “genomic complexity” (nominally, the length of DNA that belongs to only functional genes) is already high.  If one plots the genomic complexity of (1) prokaryotes, such as bacteria, (2) single-celled eukaryotes, such as amoebas, (3) multicellular water animals, such as fish (4) invertebrate land animals, such as worms, and (5) vertebrate land animals, such as mammals, versus time for first fossil evidence, one gets the following graph.

 0319 On one hand, Sharov concludes that the genomic complexity doubles every 340 million years since the start of the Earth.

On the other hand, Sharov points out that, if one projects the line down to zero genomic complexity, the intersection occurs a little over 9 billion years ago.  But, the Earth is only 4.5Byr.

Fortunately, the universe is around 15 billion years old.

0320 If the early Earth is seeded, then biologists already have a label, “panspermia”.

All other planets and moons in the solar system should be similarly seeded.

So, future space exploration may provide an answer.

If it turns out that the early Earth is seeded through panspermia, then research into the origins of life (in general) becomes even more difficult.

0321 Now, I conclude.

Sharov and Tonnessen’s noumenal overlay characterizes biosemiotics.

The Deacon-Tabaczek interscope characterizes emergence.

Both relational structures apply to inquiry into the origin of life on Earth.

This examination demonstrates how the two relational structures relate to one another and constitute complementary approaches for further inquiries into the origins of life.

0322 But, what I have learned concerns more than the topic of the origin of life.

This is significant.

Sharov and Tonnessen’s noumenal overlay may “expand” to include the entire D-T interscope, which includes both the specifying and the exemplar sign-relations.

0322 By extension, the S&T noumenal overlay associates to any three-level interscope, containing two sign-relations,according to the comparison in the following figure.

0323 The topic of the origin of life on Earth turns into a valuable insight into biosemiotics, emergence, and two sign-relations.