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Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”

David Deamer has written another book, Assembling Life, on the origin of life. It is unapologetically polemic, presenting Deamer’s view that life originated in fresh water hydrothermal fields on volcanic islands on early Earth, arguing that this provided a unique environment not just for organic che...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Bains, William
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175206/
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life10020018
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author Bains, William
author_facet Bains, William
author_sort Bains, William
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description David Deamer has written another book, Assembling Life, on the origin of life. It is unapologetically polemic, presenting Deamer’s view that life originated in fresh water hydrothermal fields on volcanic islands on early Earth, arguing that this provided a unique environment not just for organic chemistry but for the self-assembling structure that drive that chemistry and form the basis of structure in life. It is worth reading, it is an advance in the field, but is it convincing? I argue that the Origin of Life field as a whole is unconvincing, generating results in Toy Domains that cannot be scaled to any real world scenario. I suggest that, by analogy with the history of artificial intelligence and solar astronomy, we need much more scale, and fundamentally new ideas, to take the field forward.
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spelling pubmed-71752062020-04-28 Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life” Bains, William Life (Basel) Book Review David Deamer has written another book, Assembling Life, on the origin of life. It is unapologetically polemic, presenting Deamer’s view that life originated in fresh water hydrothermal fields on volcanic islands on early Earth, arguing that this provided a unique environment not just for organic chemistry but for the self-assembling structure that drive that chemistry and form the basis of structure in life. It is worth reading, it is an advance in the field, but is it convincing? I argue that the Origin of Life field as a whole is unconvincing, generating results in Toy Domains that cannot be scaled to any real world scenario. I suggest that, by analogy with the history of artificial intelligence and solar astronomy, we need much more scale, and fundamentally new ideas, to take the field forward. MDPI 2020-02-18 /pmc/articles/PMC7175206/ http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life10020018 Text en © 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Book Review
Bains, William
Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”
title Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”
title_full Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”
title_fullStr Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”
title_full_unstemmed Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”
title_short Getting Beyond the Toy Domain. Meditations on David Deamer’s “Assembling Life”
title_sort getting beyond the toy domain. meditations on david deamer’s “assembling life”
topic Book Review
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7175206/
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/life10020018
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