The Explosion of Life Forms

1 Cover

2 Title Page SCIENCES Biology , Field Director – Marie-Christine Maurel Xenobiology, Exobiology, Astrobiology, Origins of Life , Subject Heads – Marie-Christine Maurel and Marc Ollivier

3 Copyright First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address: ISTE Ltd 27-37 St George’s Road London SW19 4EU UK www.iste.co.uk John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 USA www.wiley.com © ISTE Ltd 2020 The rights of Georges Chapouthier and Marie-Christine Maurel to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937596 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78945-005-7 ERC code: LS8 Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology LS8_6 Phylogenetics, systematics, comparative biology LS8_7 Macroevolution, paleobiology

4 Introduction

5 1 Possible Traces and Clues of Early Life Forms 1.1. Introduction 1.1. Introduction Since its formation 4.5 billion years ago, the Earth has occupied a unique place in the solar system. The presence of liquid water, the first cradle of life, on 70% its surface is one of the major features of its appearance: 90% of life’s history has taken place in water and we still ask ourselves numerous questions about its formation today. Around 3.85 billion years ago, mineral matter and organic matter intertwined to produce, by chemical reactions, the amino acids of proteins, the constituents of the nucleic acids RNA and DNA (nitrogenous bases, sugars, phosphates), and all sorts of blocks that contributed to the design of the matrix of living things. Less than a billion years after the accretion of our planet, the elementary building blocks of biological molecules were thus formed on the primitive Earth. Today, life is omnipresent, covering the entire planet and its systems, at all latitudes, including our skin and our digestive tract, inhabited by thousands of bacteria species. There is a very wide variety of shapes, from rod-shaped bacilli to spherical shells, as well as helical, spiral or star-shaped structures, to name but a few of the forms observed in microscopic bacteria, that are living either in isolation, in filamentous association, in symbiosis, etc. The diversity of shapes and sizes is also observed in viral particles (Adriaenssens et al . 2018) and in multicellular organisms such as humans, snails, ferns, geckos, etc. And diversity also manifests itself over time: nowadays, we no longer find pithecanthropes, lepidodendrons, tyrannosaurs, ammonite trilobites, etc. Are the varieties observed today the only ones possible? Are there other paths, other formats, other modes that have not (yet) been explored by nature? Or by our own understanding? Or by our technological limits? The total number of living species is estimated at 10 12 , and only 10 5 of these have been identified to date (Locey and Lennon 2016). We only know 2–10% of the species that exist today, which represents 1/1,000 of the species that have existed for 3.85 billion years (Mora et al . 2011). These data alone justify the weakness of our generalizations. 1.2. Have “things” always been as they are today? 1.3. Fossil traces? 1.4. Geochemical elements confirming these recent results 1.5. Compartmentalization of resources and primary biomass 1.6. Rebuilding a living cell: a wide range of possibilities explored, from the mineral to the organic 1.7. Conclusion 1.8. Acknowledgments 1.9. References

6 2 The Nature of Life 2.1. Observations and assumptions 2.2. Descriptions and definitions 2.3. Exploration 2.4. Conclusion 2.5. References

7 3 From Form to Function 3.1. Form: a concept for knowledge 3.2. Basic structural elements: from the molecule to the cell 3.3. The weight of the physical setting 3.4. Mesoderm: base material for architect genes 3.5. Appendices and laws of mechanics 3.6. “Appendicular” movement on land 3.7. The legless 3.8. And the head 3.9. References

8 4 On Growth and Form : Context and Purpose 4.1. D’Arcy Thompson’s program 4.2. Application of mathematics to morphometry 4.3. References

9 5 The Emergence of Form in the History of Epigenetics 5.1. Introduction 5.2. From epigenesis to epigenetics 5.3. The evolution of the epigenetic landscape 5.4. Modernizing the epigenetic landscape 5.5. From epigenetic landscape to chromosome conformation 5.6. Conclusion: from form to function 5.7. Acknowledgments 5.8. References

10 6 The Many Shapes of Microbial Detection of Kin and Kind 6.1. From Darwin’s social-insects-puzzle to microbes 6.2. Handshakes of kinship or “kindship” in bacteria 6.3. The ameba world of clone discrimination/recognition 6.4. social microbes and multicellularity 6.5. Conclusion 6.6. References

11 7 Development and Evolution of Plant Forms 7.1. Introduction 7.2. Diversity of plant forms and associated functions 7.3. Origin and evolution of plant forms 7.4. Origin and evolution of plant forms 7.5. Conclusion 7.6. Acknowledgements 7.7. References

12 8 Forms of Memory 8.1. Introduction 8.2. The polymorphism of memory 8.3. Non-associative memories 8.4. Classical conditioning 8.5. Instrumental conditioning 8.6. Procedural memory as a “memory system” 8.7. Declarative memory 8.8. Short-term memory and working memory 8.9. Conclusion: organization and reconfiguration of the different forms of memory 8.10. References

13 9 The Construction of Sensory Universes 9.1. Introduction 9.2. Chemoreception 9.3. Mechanoreception 9.4. Electromagnetoreception 9.5. Information filtering 9.6. Conclusion 9.7. References

14 10 Emotional and Social Forms of Robots 10.1. Introduction 10.2. Communication with social and emotional robots 10.3. Human empathy for machines 10.4. Machine emotions 10.5. Conclusion: risks and benefits 10.6. References

15 11 When Medical Technology Mimics Living Forms 11.1. Introduction 11.2. Historical and epistemological perspective 11.3. Simulation, biomimetics and bioprinting: a future for medical technology 11.4. References

16 12 From Living to Thinking: Mosaic Architecture 12.1. Introduction 12.2. Two main principles 12.3. Genes and cells 12.4. More complex anatomical mosaics 12.5. Epistemological rehabilitation of asexual reproduction 12.6. Social mosaics 12.7. Encephalic mosaics 12.8. Mosaics of thought 12.9. Man-made objects 12.10. Human and animal cultural traits 12.11. A universality of mosaics? 12.12. Conclusion: philosophical foundations 12.13. References

17 13 Converging Technologies or Paradoxes of Power 13.1. Introduction 13.2. Might, domination, power 13.3. Life, technique, power 13.4. “Technological arrogance” 13.5. Technological convergence and singularity 13.6. Innovation, research, invention 13.7. Conclusion 13.8. References

18 List of Authors

19 Index

20 End User License Agreement

1 Chapter 1Figure 1.1. Stromatolites dating back 2.5 billion years, observed in the Transva...Figure 1.2. The figure shows changes in the abundance of elements over time, mai...Figure 1.3. Banded Iron Formation (BIF). Courtesy of Pierre Thomas (2011). For a...Figure 1.4. Carbonaceous chondrite. Courtesy of Pierre Thomas (2016). For a colo...Figure 1.5. a) Proliferation of L-Bacillus subtilis. Courtesy of Jeff Errington....