Abstract
It is often assumed that the transition between chemical evolution and biological evolution undergoes a smooth process; that once life has arisen, it will automatically ‘flood’ a solar system body. However, there is no a priori reason to assume that a link between them is a given. The fact that both chemical evolution and biological evolution meet in a single point can be critical. Thus, one may ask: can a world’s environment be favourable for chemical evolution but not for biological evolution, or vice versa? This is an important question worth exploration because certain worlds in the solar system in the past seemed to possess the possibility of chemical evolution, while several worlds in the present seem to exhibit such a possibility. Have such solar system bodies thus been, or are, ‘flooded’ by life? Did they possess the opportunity for biological evolution? The answer depends on the very nature of certain conditions under which evolution occurs, which may indicate that a link between chemical evolution and biological evolution is not automatically realised on a habitable solar system body. Thus, these conditions imply that in the emergence and distribution of cellular life, there exists an indeterminacy bottleneck at which chemical evolution and biological evolution meet through a single cell, whose descendants goes ‘information explosive’, ‘entropy implosive’ and ‘habitat expansive’, which determine whether life moves on to new environments. The consequence is that a world's environment can indeed be favourable for biological evolution, but not for chemical evolution. Thus, even if chemical evolution leads to the emergence of a microbial organism in a world, then it is not a given that such a first life form will be subjected to distribution to other environments; and not a given that its existence will continue in the environment it originated in. Thus, the bottleneck may be one of the decisive factors in the differences between habitable and inhabited worlds.
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Notes
An inverse proportionality is not necessarily observed in the flask of biological evolution. Although it is widely believed that single-celled organisms necessarily evolve into multi-cellular organisms, this trend is not observed in the history of life on the Earth; in Darwinian evolution, there are no lower or higher organisms, there is only reproductive success. Thus, microbial life represents the majority of life established in the past and present and will probably continue to represent the majority of life present until the continually increasing luminosity of the sun will make the Earth lose all its water or ultimately when the phases that will transform the sun into a red giant star end all life forms on this planet.
It is possible that life did indeed originate in the Noachian eon and continues to exist in certain locations on the planet; however, this is not relevant to the principal discussion here.
These situations do posses realism. If life e.g. emerged and was established at a hydrothermal vent, then this could have exemplified a habitat with a virtually endless energy source but with limitations in space; the organisms adapt to the parameters applicable close to the source and not to the environmental conditions further away. Thus, the organisms can continue to gain thermal energy but compel each other to move outward as they divide. Those pushed outward to a certain distance will not survive, and the hydrothermal vent where this unique population of life on an entire world exists may eventually cease to exist, as environments are dynamic and continue to change. Thus, organisms must be able to leave this environment to initiate biological evolution, because it is risky to merely stay near such a crack in the ocean floor. Of course, a considerable number of life forms exist today both at hydrothermal vents as well as in their surroundings. However, this holds true for biological evolution that has been secured; life today has secured itself with several habitats to support each other. However, in the past scenario discussed, there existed only one habitat where the organisms could live, and there existed only one population of life.
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von Hegner, I. The Indeterminacy Bottleneck: Implications for Habitable Worlds. Acta Biotheor 70, 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-021-09432-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-021-09432-0