ArticleAstrobiology2022
The Origin of Life: What Is the Question?
Article in Astrobiology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Experimental and Computational Simulation of the Prebiotic Peptide Bond Formation Driven by Wet-Dry Cycles and Gamma Ionizing Radiation: An Insight into Molecular Evolution.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- Chemical Routes to Primitive Membranes: Prebiotic Lipid Formation at the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Can the Timing of the Origin of Life Be Inferred from Trends in the Growth of Organismal Complexity?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Origin of Life and Cellular Systems: A Continuum from Prebiotic Chemistry to Biodiversity.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- A Law of Redundancy Compounds the Problem of Cancer and Precision Medicine.Journal of molecular evolution · 2023Article
- Epistemology of synthetic biology: a new theoretical framework based on its potential objects and objectives.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The question of the origin of life is a tenacious question that challenges many branches of science but is also extremely multifaceted. While prebiotic chemistry and micropaleontology reformulate the question as that of explaining the appearance of life on Earth in the deep past, systems chemistry and synthetic biology typically understand the question as that of demonstrating the synthesis of novel living matter from nonliving matter independently of historical constraints. The objective of this contribution is to disentangle the different readings of the origin-of-life question found in science. We identify three main dimensions along which the question can be differently constrained depending on context: historical adequacy, natural spontaneity, and similarity to life-as-we-know-it. We argue that the epistemic status of what needs to be explained-the explanandum-varies from approximately true when the origin-of-life question is the most constrained to entirely speculative when the constraints are the most relaxed. This difference in epistemic status triggers a shift in the nature of the origin-of-life question from an explanation-seeking question in the most constrained case to a fact-establishing question in the lesser-constrained ones. We furthermore explore how answers to some interpretations of the origin-of-life questions matter for other interpretations.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.