A new wave of origin-of-life research argues that life may not have started with a single lucky spark, but with chemistry that naturally slips toward biology—inside hydrothermal vent–like conditions. From experiments that split ocean and vent fluids to finding
Look around. The living world isn’t a collection of lone actors—it’s built from partnerships so intimate they can look like one organism. Lichens, usually formed of algae and fungi, are a famous example. Corals, assembled from algae and animal components, are another. But these are only the visible tip. The deeper story is that life, in its most complex forms, depends on symbiosis—living together—at the cellular level.
In her new book Togetherness, the author argues that symbiosis has been overlooked in how biology and ecology are explained. The payoff, she says, is bigger than getting nature’s relationships right. Recognizing how life leans on togetherness could change how we answer an older question: how did life begin—and what that might mean for the search for alien life.
The classic idea, made famous by the “warm little pond,” is now under pressure. In 1871. Charles Darwin wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker that. if one could “conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia & phosphoric salts. light. heat. electricity [etc.] present. ” then a “protein compound was chemically formed. ” ready for further complexity.
But the hunt for life’s birthplace has shifted. Today. much of the excitement is focused on deep-sea hydrothermal vents—tiny pores in rocks that behave like ready-made cell structures. In the push and pull between the hot alkaline water emitted from vents and the colder. acidic seawater. researchers point to an electrochemical gradient that could power biochemical reactions. In other words, it could power life.
Biochemist Nick Lane, at University College London, puts it plainly: “The internal pores of the vents have cell-like structures with electrically charged catalytic surfaces, while the continuous flow gives continuous reactivity.”
What makes this line of thinking compelling to scientists is its insistence on testability. It takes lessons from earlier theorists and turns them into experiments. In 1866, Ernst Haeckel—the “German Darwin”—suggested that life arose directly from inorganic materials. In 1944, physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that life evolved to be tightly coupled to its environment. In the 1960s, microbiologist Carl Woese speculated that life began as a loose-knit community, where “protocells” could freely swap molecules.
Then came a synthesis. In 1985, Freeman Dyson fused Schrödinger’s environmental coupling idea with Lynn Margulis’s breakthrough work on symbiosis. Margulis marshalled evidence that complex cells—those of plants. animals and fungi—originated in an ancient act of symbiosis between two simpler cells. Symbiosis, in this biological definition, refers to two different species that live intimately together for a significant period of time.
Dyson suggested life had two origins. First were early cells called protocells, where metabolic processes—the biochemical reactions that provide energy—got going. Later came a way to store genetic information as a replicator: a strand of RNA. Dyson’s picture had these two proto-life forms merging through a process akin to symbiosis.
Now, laboratories are trying to see if pieces of that story can happen in the right physical setting.
To understand how. the author visited Lane’s lab to watch researchers mimic early conditions and begin making their own protocells. They focus on an environment where geochemistry shades into biochemistry. Lane describes their target as “an environment,” where “geochemistry gives rise seamlessly to biochemistry”—where non-life becomes life.
Inside an oxygen-free “anaerobic” chamber. Feixue Liu works on an early step in metabolism: the reaction of carbon dioxide and hydrogen to make simple organic compounds. including formate and acetate. She shows a Y-shaped piece of apparatus meant to simulate a hydrothermal vent. In the setup, ocean fluid flows down one side of the Y, while vent fluid flows down the other. The goal is to mimic the ancient hydrothermal environment as closely as possible. The whole process is carried out in a controlled-atmosphere chamber without oxygen present. described as “a bubble of the ancient Earth from 4 billion years ago.” A chip detects any organic molecules produced by the flow.
For the author, one of the most striking recent discoveries is that metabolic processes themselves may arise spontaneously. Molecules tend to move toward thermodynamic minima—what biochemists describe as “the resting state of molecules.” Under this view. even complex molecules can assemble because chemistry is steering them toward energetically preferred pathways. The argument extends beyond Earth experiments: the nucleotide ingredients for RNA and DNA can form spontaneously, even in asteroids. And metabolic pathways can emerge without genes already doing the “programming.”.
Lane and colleagues point to a particularly strong piece of evidence: the idea that a metabolic pathway used in all life forms may have arisen before the genes that code for it. Lane says metabolism is often treated as genetically encoded. but work over the last decade suggests it is “actually spontaneous chemistry. a network of thermodynamically favoured reactions.”.
The acetyl-coenzyme A pathway is central to this reasoning. Lane says it is the oldest and simplest way cells unlock energy and is used in all known life forms. Bill Martin at the University of Düsseldorf. Germany. showed that the pathway appears older than the enzymes that catalyze it and also older than the genes encoding those enzymes: “the pathway came first. then the genes followed in its wake.”.
There’s also evidence that the energy molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) can form spontaneously in the right conditions. such as within mineral shelters in hydrothermal vents. ATP is described as the universal energy currency in all cells—from bacteria to blue whales. The overall implication is that life’s shape may mirror the reactions already occurring naturally.
Stuart Harrison, Lane’s colleague, ties it to what matters most: “It’s not what gets made, but how that potentially explains life’s origins.”
In Dyson’s framing. metabolic processes in a protocell set the stage for RNA to arrive later as an “invasion.” Harrison. Lane and colleagues suggest something different—more automatic. more functional. They have found that random nucleotides forming in the communal soup of a protocell can act as templates to make peptides: chains of amino acids that form proteins.
Harrison describes the shift this way: “You now have information which. yes. it’s random at first. but that information is getting loosely translated into function.” In a protocell where metabolism is already running and there is an energy source. a genetic code basis could begin operating automatically. Natural selection can then kick in.
“If you have function and you inherit that bit of information [via a gene], you might be more likely to survive and natural selection starts to actually happen,” Harrison says.
The payoff is that this route toward life may help resolve a stubborn paradox in origin-of-life studies: the paradox of heredity. Genetic heredity requires translation—an information pipeline turning genetic material into protein. Cells rely on a complex production line, including a molecular machine called a ribosome that creates proteins from amino acids. But translation, by that logic, requires evolution. And evolution requires heredity. It’s a loop with no obvious starting point.
Raquel Nunes Palmeira, also at University College London, asks what would happen if translation could happen before the machinery exists—without enzymes driving a full production line. “You can get evolution without having the whole shebang of the machinery.”
Nunes Palmeira, Lane and their colleagues model how this could work. They find that random sequences of RNA built from nucleotide units can “solidify” into distinct genes that code for proteins with a specific function—driving growth of the protocell. For natural selection, the requirements are heredity, variation, and differential success. The model suggests that lengths of RNA coding for growth—such as the conversion of carbon dioxide into organic compounds—come first.
Here, Nunes Palmeira emphasizes the relationship between RNA and the protocell. “Relating back to Dyson’s idea, here the RNA and the protocell are not separate individuals,” she says. “The RNA isn’t an invading parasite. but rather is an intrinsic part of the metabolic processes going on in the protocell.”.
The idea also echoes Woese’s earlier vision. He too suggested translation could occur naturally, with proteins made by random RNA fragments because of chemical affinities between nucleotides and amino acids.
But the research is not a claim that life’s origin is already solved. Harrison cautions against treating the framework as a finished map. Even if researchers one day create a working. reproducing protocell in the lab. that still wouldn’t prove how life evolved. “There will always be a question mark,” he says. “Have we solved the origin of life. or have we solved an origin?” Harrison points out there are many alternative hypotheses about how life arose.
Still, there is a way to stress-test the idea beyond Earth benches and chambers: look for parallels elsewhere in the universe.
“You can look on other planets,” Nunes Palmeira says, to see whether chemistry leads to metabolism in a similar way. “We can look in other places, too.”
In March. scientists analysing samples taken from the asteroid Ryugu announced they had detected all five nucleobases that make up DNA and RNA: adenine. cytosine. guanine. thymine and uracil. The news was widely framed as evidence supporting the notion that life may have been seeded on Earth from elsewhere—delivered by asteroid.
But Harrison’s interpretation is different in emphasis. He says the detection supports the article’s broader claim that nucleobases—and perhaps even the larger molecules of RNA and DNA—form easily across the cosmos. All the ingredients needed for life were also found on the asteroid Bennu. Harrison calls it “more like these chemicals are just a thermodynamic minimum, perhaps at the universal scale.”.
Samples taken from Bennu show it contains all the molecular ingredients for life, with NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona credited in the material describing the findings.
The underlying theme becomes simpler and, for some, unsettling: life may be chemistry chasing the lowest-energy option. The author says life can be defined as a biochemical process that works to a thermodynamic minimum. Lane adds, “Amazingly, if you start from hydrogen and carbon dioxide, the formation of cellular biomass is favoured thermodynamically.”.
That isn’t just a prediction about Earth. It’s also a bet about how alien life might look at the level of shared building blocks. Harrison says the chemical affinities could mean life in different worlds uses similar genetic building blocks. “All life in the universe could be eerily similar to us,” he says. He also points to Saturn’s moon Enceladus as a good place to look. noting that it has hydrothermal vents similar to those on Earth.
The picture that emerges is not a neat replay of Dyson’s symbiosis story. and Harrison admits the tension: “The picture emerging is not quite the symbiotic coming together of two entities. as envisioned by Dyson.” He says there may still be molecular cooperativity between chemical reactions. RNA polymers and early peptides. but he frames it as a matter of definitions. “It depends on how loose a definition of symbiosis we are happy to have.”.
If symbiosis requires two species living together, Harrison says, the early origin of life becomes difficult to fit—there weren’t any species yet. But the author says she’s comfortable loosening the definition to allow the “togetherness” idea to apply to the earliest communal chemistry.
She points back to Woese. who described a universal ancestor as “communal. a loosely knit. diverse conglomeration of primitive cells that evolved as a unit.” In this telling. the primordial soup wasn’t a prelude to competition—it was a communal broth. And the “vibe” of the ancient hydrothermal vent. still vital in life and ecosystems today. is rendered not as a lonely mechanism but as togetherness.
In the end, the story isn’t just about where life began. It’s about what kind of life we might find—and what we might already be missing when we explain the biological world as if everything depends only on rivalry.
origin of life hydrothermal vents symbiosis protocells RNA DNA nucleobases ATP thermodynamics prebiotic chemistry Ryugu Bennu Enceladus extraterrestrial life