Why Functional Genomics Is the Central Concern of Biology and the Hard Problem of Abiogenesis

Life has many defining characteristics, not the least of which is that it exists in a self-perpetuating homeostatic state that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. However, since the universe contains many abiotic dissipative structures that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium, that alone cannot be taken to be definitive of life, at least not life on earth as we know it. What distinguishes the latter from nonlife, and hence biology as a science distinct from chemistry and physics, is genomic information, i.e., the information encoded in DNA. Living systems do what they do only by virtue of that information. As Robert Rosen showed by mathematical abstraction, life is a complex self-entailing system of metabolism, repair, and replication, and organisms embody modeling relations with their environment. In all known organisms, metabolism, repair, and replication require a genome, which informs the entailments through which the organism relates and adapts to its environment. Biologists came to recognize this in the latter part of the twentieth century, and hence the cutting edge of biology is now focused almost entirely on genomics (and its derivatives such as epigenomics). With genomic information as its central concern, biology is a historical as much as a physical science. Life cannot be reduced to chemistry and physics because genomically informed modeling relations are physically indeterminate and context-dependent, with historical contingency being an irreducible part of the relevant context. As a result, the science of paleontology is essential for reconstructing the evolutionary development of life on earth. This then constitutes the hard problem for the origin-of-life discourse: the sequence of contingencies that produced the first functional genome is not well preserved in the fossil record. Therefore, the problem of abiogenesis will probably remain unsolved and a matter of speculation until we learn how to create a true (i.e., genomically informed) organism from scratch.