Life, uh, finds a way — and apparently, so does a jumble of little strings of simple code.
In an experiment that simulated what would happen if you left a bunch of random data alone for millions of generations, Google researchers say they witnessed the emergence of self-replicating digital lifeforms. And their findings, published as a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, could mirror — or at least shed light on — the emergence of actual biological life.
“Managing to evolve self-replicating programs from random starting points is a great achievement,” Susan Stepney at the University of York, UK, who was not involved in the study, told New Scientist. “This is definitely a great step towards understanding potential routes to the origin of life, here in a medium quite removed from the standard ‘wetware’ of biology.”
Life on Earth likely began in a “primordial soup.” Over billions of years and countless more tiny interactions, a random mixture of water and organic compounds eventually brewed the first organisms. What that exactly looked like is unclear, and it’s a tricky idea to wrap your head around. How did chaos give birth to order?
“I don’t think anything magic happened,” study co-author Ben Laurie, a software engineer at Google, told New Scientist. “Physics occurred, and it just occurred a lot over a very long time, and it gave rise to some very complicated things.”
Laurie and his team’s simulation is a digital primordial soup of sorts. No rules were imposed, and no impetus was given to the random data. To keep things as lean as possible, they used a funky programming language called Brainfuck, which to use the researchers’ words is known for its “obscure minimalism,” allowing for only two mathematical operations: adding one or subtracting one.
The long and short of it is that they modified it to only allow the random data — stand-ins for molecules — to interact with each other, “left to execute code and overwrite themselves and neighbors based on their own instructions.”
And despite these austere conditions, self-replicating programs were able to form.
Laurie told New Scientist that he believes the findings show that there are “inherent mechanisms” that allow life to form. But self-replication in itself is not life — we should also be seeing an increase in the complexity of the organisms, according to experts.
“The complexity, as they measure it, goes up after the onset of the self-replicator. But it’s not clear that it ‘takes off’ in an interesting way,” Richard Watson at the University of Southampton, UK, who was not involved in the study, told New Scientist. “Self-replication is important, but it would be a mistake to believe it’s a magic bullet from which everything else that’s exciting about life follows automatically”.
Some of that may be due to practical limitations. Laurie believes that, given enough computing power — they were already pushing it with billions of steps per second on a laptop — they would’ve seen more complex programs pop up. Give it another go with beefier hardware, and we could well see something more lifelike come to be.
More on life’s beginnings: Scientists Say Textbooks Are Wrong About How Life Exploded on Earth
