Apr 19, 2026 08:49 PM
https://www.templeton.org/news/evolution...in-of-life
INTRO: A story about the origins of life in the cosmos starts at Earth’s equator, where Dian Fiantis, a professor of soil science at Andalas University in Indonesia, investigated how seemingly dead environments come back to life. In 2018, she traveled to Mt. Anak Krakatoa (which emerged after the famous Krakatoa’s eruption) to collect the volcanic ash it ejected two months before.
In her lab, she found out that volcanic glass (SiO2), the dominant chemical found in the ash, has extremely tiny holes that could store water. “A good place for cyanobacteria to grow,” said Fiantis. The microbe, which scientists called “nature’s little alchemist,” engineered the surrounding environment so that complex living systems like lichens and vascular plants could grow.
Fiantis’ research shows us what happens “before life” in modern circumstances. It might not tell us how life began on the early Earth, but this is the closest contemporary example of the blurry line between life and non-life. Just like a meteor impact or active hydrothermal vents, a volcanic eruption could represent the hellish conditions where nature may “mix things up and select for chemical configurations and try new things [that lead to life],” said Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institute of Sciences.
Hazen is one of many scientists who are now proponents of “evolution before life,” an idea referring to a universal chemical evolution that spans billions of years and comprises all possible space in the universe. This hypothesis argues that life emerged gradually as molecules evolved from simplicity to complexity, undergoing selections until reaching biological functions.
Science can’t create life from scratch yet, and no one has convincingly explained how life emerged on Earth in the first place. But the theory of chemical evolution, which stands on hundreds of scientific papers since the 1990s, is hot on the trail of science’s greatest enigma. It is not an “Earth-bound” theory, and it is now testable with AI technology.
“I am very much a believer that [chemical evolution] is the future of origins of life research,” says Joshua Goldford, a computational biologist at California Institute of Technology... (MORE - details)
INTRO: A story about the origins of life in the cosmos starts at Earth’s equator, where Dian Fiantis, a professor of soil science at Andalas University in Indonesia, investigated how seemingly dead environments come back to life. In 2018, she traveled to Mt. Anak Krakatoa (which emerged after the famous Krakatoa’s eruption) to collect the volcanic ash it ejected two months before.
In her lab, she found out that volcanic glass (SiO2), the dominant chemical found in the ash, has extremely tiny holes that could store water. “A good place for cyanobacteria to grow,” said Fiantis. The microbe, which scientists called “nature’s little alchemist,” engineered the surrounding environment so that complex living systems like lichens and vascular plants could grow.
Fiantis’ research shows us what happens “before life” in modern circumstances. It might not tell us how life began on the early Earth, but this is the closest contemporary example of the blurry line between life and non-life. Just like a meteor impact or active hydrothermal vents, a volcanic eruption could represent the hellish conditions where nature may “mix things up and select for chemical configurations and try new things [that lead to life],” said Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institute of Sciences.
Hazen is one of many scientists who are now proponents of “evolution before life,” an idea referring to a universal chemical evolution that spans billions of years and comprises all possible space in the universe. This hypothesis argues that life emerged gradually as molecules evolved from simplicity to complexity, undergoing selections until reaching biological functions.
Science can’t create life from scratch yet, and no one has convincingly explained how life emerged on Earth in the first place. But the theory of chemical evolution, which stands on hundreds of scientific papers since the 1990s, is hot on the trail of science’s greatest enigma. It is not an “Earth-bound” theory, and it is now testable with AI technology.
“I am very much a believer that [chemical evolution] is the future of origins of life research,” says Joshua Goldford, a computational biologist at California Institute of Technology... (MORE - details)
