This Biology Book Blew Me Away

#1 Original. More importantly, I like it :) Game theory meets ideology. I reckon that an multi-agent based simulation model with enough features could test your hypothesis. I think sociology will get there in about a decade. If you do this now you'll revolutionise a part of the field.

#2 Not original. Epistemological theories have this covered. Also, you're blurring or at least not making distinct different kinds of knowing. Check out phenomenology as well. Check out cognitive neuroscience. I know these are huge areas but you seriously think nobody has thought about this following on from McCullogh-Pitts? There's knowing how versus knowing that for a start. There's knowing facts versus intuitions. Inductive reasoning has been studied. Intuitionism is a thing.

#3 Not original. Cybernetics has this covered. Also, Your steps are far far far too general.

Continuing abiogenesis may very well be occuring (in the very few locations that may still resemble the beginning), but at what complexity are we defining "life" when asking this question? Simple spontaneous assembly of RNA precursors? Something more fully fledged?

In any case, the problem isn't even competitors that have evolved since then - it's the existence of complex metabolism. All of the "ingredients" you would need for abiogenesis to occur are now consumed by established organisms, ripping down the molecules for their own energy needs before they can catalyze into a more complex form.

Life as we know it doesn't have room for the earliest products of abiogenesis anymore. Whatever form our earliest genetic ancestors may have taken, Earth's present-day micro-biosphere is simply too ubiquitous and too ravenous.

It is written by two of the most intelligent people I think I've ever come across, Eric Smith, who is an external professor at the Sante Fe Institute, and Harold Morowitz, who founded the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason. Both men work in very disparate fields. Morowitz was a specialist of biology, origin of life scenarios, and biochemistry while Smith is a (brilliant) physicist and chemist. However, together they have assembled an encompassing theoretical structure that I am confident will lead science for several decades, once it is gradually integrated into other fields of research - e.g., Jeremy England at MIT has looked at some of the same thermodynamic phenomena using statistical physics (great article on his work - https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory...)

Eric Smith actually did a video describing this work while at Sante Fe that is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElMqwgkXguw

This is the first paragraph of the paper mentioned above:

Life is universally understood to require a source of free energy and mechanisms with which to harness it. Re- markably, the converse may also be true: the continuous generation of sources of free energy by abiotic processes may have forced life into existence as a means to alleviate the buildup of free energy stresses. This assertion – for which there is precedent in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and growing empirical evidence from chemistry – would imply that life had to emerge on the earth, that at least the early steps would occur in the same way on any similar planet, and that we should be able to predict many of these steps from first principles of chemistry and physics together with an accurate understanding of geochemical conditions on the early earth. A deterministic emergence of life would reflect an essential continuity between physics, chemistry, and biology. It would show that a part of the order we recognize as living is thermodynamic order inherent in the geosphere, and that some aspects of Darwinian selection are expressions of the likely simpler statistical mechanics of physical and chemical self-organization.