Team Meeting : Ludo L.J. Schoenmakers (KLI)

We’re pleased to annonce thatLudo L.J. Schoenmakers will be joining us at our upcoming team meeting. He is  a post doctoral fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) in Klosterneuburg, Austria.

With a background in both philosophy of science and molecular biology, Ludo investigates foundational philosophical and historical questions in biology and chemistry. During the meeting, he will present his latest research, which examines how evolutionary theory can inform contemporary Origins of Life ( OoL) research.

He kindly shared a short excerpt offering a small introduction of his talk:

” Evolution and the Origins of Life

Attempts to apply the theory of evolution outside its domain of origin are about as old as the theory itself. Examples include fields such as economics, literary theory, quantum physics, and many others. Typically, these applications rely on evolutionary theory being sufficiently epistemically and ontologically domain independent to be applied elsewhere, but it is precisely this domain-independence that has been doubted. A different approach is to look at applications of evolutionary theory to a near-biological domain such as Origins of Life (OoL) research. This highly interdisciplinary field has recently seen an increase in applications of concepts and language from evolutionary theory, yet it remains to be seen to what extent this use is justified.

One motivation for OoL researchers to apply evolutionary theory to origins of life research is the presumed continuity between the earliest life-forms and extant cellular life. Extant cellular life is clearly evolutionary and this raises the question when evolution began to apply to life. Were the earliest prebiotic chemical reaction networks already evolutionary, in some important sense, or did evolution only come into play with the formation of some kind of protocell? This is a complicated question that has chemical, biological, and philosophical components. Here, after highlighting some of the key scientific and philosophical aspects of the tremendously broad field that is origins of life research, I will focus on the question: What would a minimal theory of evolution that is applicable to origins of life research look like? In other words, what is evolution at the edges of life? “