Speaking of black smokers, there’s an interesting paper out on abiogenesis: Morowitz, Harold, and Eric Smith, Energy flow and the organization of life, Santa Fe Institute Working Papers, (2006) (PDF) contends that life may actually be an inevitable result of the buildup of free energy in an environment like that of the early Earth. From the intro:
Life is universally understood to require a source of free energy and mechanisms with which to harness it. Remarkably, the converse may also be true: the continuous generation of sources of free energy by abiotic processes may have forced life into existence as a means to alleviate the buildup of free energy stresses. This assertion—for which there is precedent in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and growing empirical evidence from chemistry—would imply that life had to emerge on the earth, that at least the early steps would occur in the same way on any similar planet, and that we should be able to predict many of these steps from first principles of chemistry and physics together with an accurate understanding of geochemical conditions on the early earth. A deterministic emergence of life would reflect an essential continuity between physics, chemistry, and biology. It would show that a part of the order we recognize as living is thermodynamic order inherent in the geosphere, and that some aspects of Darwinian selection are expressions of the likely simpler statistical mechanics of physical and chemical self-organization.

—Morowitz, Harold, and Eric Smith, Energy flow and the organization of life, Santa Fe Institute Working Paper, (2006) (PDF)

Good reading, some really interesting thoughts.

Also: it’s not saying much, but the truth is, this is something which really just rings true to me. For all the conviction of folk who’ve always argued how improbable life is, nothing about abiogenesis has ever really struck me as that startling. We know that life as it currently exists is essentially what Morowitz and Smith are succinctly describing, at least at the thermodynamic level: large amounts of energy driving matter into isolated pockets of order (even as the system as a whole drifts to a greater net disorder). We got matter, we got lots of energy (vast amounts available from the sun and radioisotope decay—the only two ultimate drivers1 on this planet, at least) relative to what life requires. We know matter can be so arranged that it spontaneously perpetuates that same organization… so, somehow, assuming that it could also get to such organization spontaneously given all that energy being available, it’s just never seemed that big a conceptual leap to me… notwithstanding the staggering complexity of the replicators we currently observe. Complexity, given sufficient time and energy, happens. So life happens. I remember thinking much the same thing reading Russell’s stuff on the subject. A lot of this just makes an awful lot of sense.

Anyway. Like I said, that’s not saying much. It’s just intuition, and a lot of intuition turns out, in retrospect, to be nothing more than prejudice. But, for what it’s worth, yes, I think what Morowitz and Smith have here is a quite reasonable supposition, and a pretty good way of putting it.

(Found via The Panda’s Thumb. See also Nature’s brief and their newsblog.)

1 Oops. Forgot tidal energies. Mea culpe. I meant ‘two of the three’… yeah, you know.