A treasure that belonged to Howard Pattee

As rightly pointed out by Harold W. Lewis in a CoCo seminar during the distant 2016, the origins of systems science can be traced to general systems theory, one of the many holistic paradigms of the time, developed by none other than Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Similarly, it is impossible to deny the influence of the Macy conferences in Manhattan (which later led to the rise of cybernetics) on the development of “systems thinking”. Within that intricate web of ideas we find George Klir, distinguished professor emeritus of our department at Binghamton who served as a catalyst in the creation of several transdisciplinary groups whose founding dates back to the 1950s, becoming at the same time the first president of the International Federation for Systems Research (IFSR) during 1980 and 1984. In that lineage of system scientists at Binghamton we find Howard Pattee, who was hired until the mid-1970s and among his many accomplishments we find him as a participant in the first Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems held at Los Alamos, an event in 1987 that kicked off what we know today as artificial life.

As in any other place, from time to time my university gets rid of the bibliographic material abandoned by those professors and students who for some reason have stopped working in that institution. Howard Pattee was no exception, and over the last summer I had the opportunity to acquire one of the specimens that belonged to his book collection. How did I know it was his? Because, albeit with a marker smudge, it has his name engraved in the upper right corner of the cover. Apparently Pattee liked to mark his books like any child likes to mark his toys. Unlike many of the other texts in Howard’s collection that I was able to acquire that same day, this is the one in the most deplorable condition. To the eye it looks like a pile of old pages whose rusty staples emphasize the age of the copy. On the torn cover we find interesting elements about the origin of this publication.

First, we note that we are facing a series of lectures given on January 14, 15 and 16, 1965, at Agra University, an educational institution in India that has now changed its name to Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar University. On the title page it is indicated that the author of these lectures was Professor O. N. Perti, an Indian researcher whose trace I could not find on the Internet. And if you try to find any trace of such lectures on the Internet, you will find that it is not possible to find them either. But that is not the most intriguing thing. When I opened the book I realized that the subject was the origin of life, and after reading it I knew I was in front of a treasure. After months of searching for help in binding and scanning such a relic, today my efforts will finally culminate in a review of it, an extended explanation of why I believe Howard Pattee had this little book, which barely reaches 116 pages, well in hand.

Introduction

The origin of life is perhaps one of the greatest unsolved enigmas. Although today we have the ability to synthetically construct the elements that may well have formed life in a primordial state, it is still impossible to reach the level of dynamism that we observe in life. In the 1920s the Russian chemist Aleksandr Oparin and the British scientist John B. S. Haldane independently proposed similar ideas concerning the conditions required for the existence of abiogenesis on our planet.

However, it was not until 1957 that the first International Symposium on “The Origin of Life on the Earth” was held in Moscow. It is in this context that Perti introduces us to the problem of the origin of life, emphasizing the difference between mechanism and organism, alluding to the paradigm of cybernetics as a cornerstone in the analogy of living entities as machines. From this metaphor, in this brief introduction of his lectures, the author glimpses four points that are essential to take into account when describing life as an apparatus:

1. The ability to reproduce leads to accumulation of structural energy.
2. Entropy induces two necessary conditions for life.
3. Distinction between the different self-replicating processes.
4. Mutations as irrelevant changes on self replication systems.

Here (1) tells us that the stimulus for replication is derived directly from the pattern of the replicating unit itself, and I find an enormous parallelism between this idea and the dynamic kinetic stability proposed by Addy Pross. Each time an entity self-replicates this increases the structural energy, which in turn catalyzes the use of raw materials in the environment to the production of more self-replicating structures.

In (2) Perti points to Schrodinger as the precursor of the use of the concept of entropy as a thermodynamic constraint for life. Moreover, as a logical consequence of the above, the author puts on the table two necessary conditions for life, which are: (i) the living unit must have a boundary to separate it from the environment; (ii) some part of the environment should enter the system, undergo a complicated change in the system, then a part should go back to the environment. Here what caught my attention is that, despite being a different model, Varela-Maturana’s autopoiesis also requires (i) as a necessary condition for life.

Although the first two points are well recognized in the world of the origin of life, from my perspective Perti does an excellent job in mentioning (3), a point that in my short experience not many consider relevant in the origin and primordial evolution of life. The replication systems used by a crystal, a DNA molecule and a cell are quite different from each other. Understanding the evolutionary transition between each type of those replication systems could lead to a better understanding of the origin and evoluition of information handling.

From an objective point of view, finding self-replicating structures in primordial atmospheres does not seem to be so challenging. It is their perseverance that is perhaps one of the most interesting qualities to achieve. Under a highly turbulent environment, how was it possible for the first self-replicating entities to persist? With (4) Perti alludes to mutations as those changes that do not affect the ability to replicate, and at the same time leaves us to imagine a narrative that makes us wonder about the resilience of replicative structures in primordial environments.

A New Outlook for Biology: An introduction to the study of JEEWANU

With this preamble we are ready to enter the second chapter of the publication, which, from my perspective, is an excellent review of the knowledge that was held about the origin of life at that time. As if it were a book written by Carl Sagan, the author begins by taking a look at the knowledge we have about the origin and early evolution of the universe, with emphasis on the formation of our planet. At that time, by intermingling all the knowledge that was available, it was believed the solar system to be about 4.5 billions years old and to have been formed from 137 to 290 million years after the formation of the elements that comprise the solar system had been completed about 4.6 to 4.8 billion years ago.

After that, being aware there is a relationship between planetary evolution and the origin of life, Perti puts on the table the two predominant theories about the origin of Earth’s crust, its oceans and its atmosphere. On the one hand, the “Hot” theory points out that these elements of our planet were forged during the primary process of differentiation of the Earth’s substance from the hot material of the protoplanet. On the other hand, the “Cold” theory claims that such elements were formed from the cold material of the Earth by melting. Although the phases in the evolution of the atmosphere were debatable in those days, the author points out that there was little doubt that the early atmosphere was anoxygenic and later became oxygenic. In this way, the author closes this subsection with a magnificent review of the Miller-Urey experiments and others, letting us see that the sources of energy on the primordial earth (radioactivity, volcanic heat, lightning and sunlight) are fully compatible with their experimental results.

Going beyond Miller-Urey, Perti offers a complete chronicle of the various experiments that had been carried out up to that time in order to study aspects of early chemical diversity on our planet. Under that train of thought, the author concludes that amino acids could have been produced abiogenically on the pre-actualistic Earth era using a variety of possibilities for their formation. From amino acids, the next logical step is going to peptides, compounds which are formed out of two or more amino acid molecules by elimination of water. Again, after an experimental review, Perti concludes that the abiogenic formation of peptides does not seem to be a difficult task, the simplest method for their proliferation being an aqueous medium and sunlight. At the conclusion of this subsection, the author indicates that up to that date no method of amino acid copolymer production had been found to the lead of enzymatic activity, which makes very difficult to imagine how the first living systems came to have enzymes for abiogenic synthesis of protein molecules.

This is when we get to one of my favorite discussions in the book: what did the earliest life forms on Earth look like? To begin this dialogue, the author clarifies that, even if life had an external origin and arrived on Earth by means of panspermia, this does not solve the enigma of how life originated from its simplest components. Analyzing in detail the information that was available at the time, Perti mentions that there is ample evidence to believe that there were biogenic deposits formed by lime-secreting organisms. According to the fossil record, the date of airing of these deposits was 2.67 billion years and there was very little doubt they belonged to the pre-actualistic atmosphere period. Thus, Perti concluded that approximately 2.7 billion years ago, there were lime-secreting life-forms. To culminate the present chapter, the author investigates different current life forms that possess extremely bizarre metabolic systems and that have a wider range of adaptability to temperature, since according to him such specimens should be more similar to the aerobic living systems that inhabited during the pre-actualistic period of the Earth.

JEEWANU: Particles with properties of a biological order

Since the previous chapter Perti had mentioned the concept of Jeewanu, which are synthetic particles that mimic the structure and function of cells. At this point, the author starts by abstracting the concept of life, making it independent of its substratum. Compiling a miscellany of definitions of life at the time, the author introduces the concept of biological order. The idea is very simple. Although we can define life as a chemical substance which, by a process of chemical reactions with the substances of its surroundings, accomplishes reproduction and development, we still must pay attention to more complex behaviors we observe in life, such as growth, multiplication and metabolic control. We define such features as being of biological order. Following this characterization, Perti went on to study popular paradigms of the time that served as a model of an immediate precursor to what we know today as a cell, including coacervates and microspheres. Although the author concludes that any such model fails as a candidate to be an immediate precursor of life as we know it, Perti points out that studying cell models or bio-like structures makes us think more about typical properties of biological order.

Given a system, let’s define growth as the increase in size of the system from within by accumulation material within the semi-permeable boundary of such a system; multiplication as an increase in number of these systems in such a manner that the newer systems come into existence through the parent system; and metabolic activity as any series of chemical reactions which take place within the system as a result of which as least a part of the environmental molecules entering the system are converted into the system. With these three, Perti defines that a system is living only if it consumes appropriate nutrition, becomes bigger by the synthesis of “body material” from the nutrition consumed and produces its own kind. Observe that this definition holds no matter what ingredients are involved in the making of the system, in the nutrition or in the “body material”. Perti’s punchline is that Jeewanu (which from Sanskrit translates as ‘particles of life’) meets that definition of life, and to further strengthen his claim, the rest of the chapter is devoted to explaining how it is possible to obtain Jeewanu in the laboratory and what are the characteristics of Jeewanu that had been experimentally demonstrated up to that point.

Conclusion

Although at first I thought that at that time there was not such a deep understanding of the origin of life, when I read Perti’s lectures I realized that by the 1960s there was already a broad and in-depth knowledge of the subject. Throughout the text I was able to find references that today are very difficult to trace, both by author and by publication, which makes me think that there are many excellent references that perhaps have been lost in the ocean of articles that we have produced to this day. I am still wondering if it was me who found that book, or if that book found me. I made this discovery shortly before attending ALIFE 2024, so I read it during the trip and showed it to many people interested in the subject. At that conference I met Maria Веspаlоvа, who was starting her postdoc at one of the many Max Planck Institutes. I dedicate this review to Maria, as it was she who encouraged me to scan this book and share it with the world. Today, after almost six months, I finally did it Maria.

You can access the book via google drive. Just click here.