Not since German chemist Friedrich Wöhler demonstrated in 1828 that an organic compound, urea, could be synthesized from inorganic precursors, ammonium and cyanic acid (Kinne-Saffran and Kinne, 290), has the line between organic and inorganic or, in this case, biology and chemistry, been blurred as it has been in Addy Pross’ book What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology. In it, Pross dispels the traditional belief that life’s evolution and origin must be subdivided into a chemical phase followed by a biological one and, instead, argues that, fundamentally, there exists only one process whose description can be in chemical terms of a high-complexity phase preceded by a low-complexity one [Fig. 1].
Furthermore, Pross posits that the three big questions concerning the origin of life, in effect, What is life? How to make life? and How did life emerge? are not separate questions or problems at all but are, in fact, all interconnected [Fig. 2]. This interconnectedness reinforces his aforementioned chemical complexity phases while also bringing Darwinian processes to bear even on the chemical world as well as the biological one, establishing a “complexity continuum” (Pross, Chapter 7). Underpinning this continuum is a relatively new branch of chemistry called systems chemistry which deals with self-replicating molecules that, in turn, evolve into self-replicating systems of molecules.
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Where Wöhler inadvertantly and significantly weakened the vitalistic hypothesis of living cells’ functionality in his time (Kinne-Saffran and Kinne, 291), Pross picks up in ours by basically reducing biology, the science of life, to what amounts to a continuation of chemistry, the science of chemicals, albeit here self-replicating chemicals and a chemistry that got its apparent start several billion years ago.
- Kinne-Saffran, E., and Kinne, R. K. Vitalism and synthesis of urea. From Friedrich Wöhler to Hans A, Krebs. Am J Nephrol (1999): Pages 290-4. Print.
- Pross, Addy. What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.
