Introduction

At a public lecture at the Sorbonne in 1864, the renowned French scientist Louis Pasteur raised the fundamental philosophical question pertaining to the origin of life: can matter organize itself to form a living system? Pasteur answered this question with a decisive no. He was referring both to the emergence of life on the primordial Earth and to the possibility of “spontaneous generation” – the formation of living organisms out of matter here and now. Life, Pasteur believed, was originally created by God and organisms are subsequently born only from parents.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant had also pondered the question of the nature of biological organization and its emergence from matter. Unlike other physical objects, Kant noted, an organism is an interactive system in which parts and whole are reciprocally dependent. This circular, self-reproducing nature defines a living system and the critical question is whether we can understand the production of such an organized, functional whole in causal, materialistic terms.

For Kant, the idea of physical principles of self-organization, working mechanistically without any guiding plan and yet capable of producing an organized whole, was inconceivable. Hence, the very possibility of the emergence of life from matter seemed to him absurd. Although not sharing Kant's and Pasteur's convictions, most scientists toward the end of the nineteenth century nevertheless preferred not to deal with the origin-of-life problem.