A new special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B—born out of a Santa Fe Institute workshop on the origins of life—brings together leading voices addressing the theoretical, experimental, and philosophical challenges of understanding how life emerges from nonliving matter. From Oparin and Miller’s pioneering prebiotic experiments to the frontiers of synthetic biology, the study of life’s origins has evolved into a genuinely multidisciplinary enterprise, uniting geochemistry, systems biology, artificial life, and information theory.
Yet the very definition of life remains deeply contested. Competing frameworks—focused on metabolism, information, or self-organization—each capture important aspects of living systems, but none are sufficient on their own. The “adjacent possible,” a concept borrowed from Stuart Kauffman, offers one way forward: evolution is not a fixed path but an open-ended unfolding of possibilities, where every new form of organization expands the space of what life can become.
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