On the feasibility of nonadaptive, nonsequential abiogenesis. An alternative to the Oparin-Haldane model

Juan Rivas-Santisteban 

The emergence of life from non-living matter remains one of the most profound unresolved questions in natural philosophy. The Oparin-Haldane model assumes a gradualist evolution, where adaptive precursors are obligated. Yet, for more than a century, all experimental efforts have failed to achieve abiogenesis. May it be that this view is paradoxical in explaining how living matter arises without preexisting coordinated and complex structures, since these are assumed to be already the product of selection well before living forms could control inheritability. In Oparin-Haldane's model, adaptive changes in molecules are largely decoupled from abiogenesis. Here, instead, I elaborate on the possibility of a nonadaptive-nonsequential model, in which life-grade complexity emerges spontaneously, ungoverned by natural selection, through contingent coalescence under excess capabilities. The Price equation, as a mathematical tool, can help assisting our thinking on the evolvability of selection itself. Selection is best understood as the non-null covariance between a trait value and its fitness, a quantity that itself evolves. Prior to abiogenesis, this covariance should be effectively zero, then selection begins to govern the number of feasible interactions among the primaeval components. By releasing abiogenesis from gradualist idealisations, this model may provide a new theoretical foundation for interrogating life’s origins.