The origin of life is traditionally investigated through the emergence of biomolecules, metabolic pathways, replication, and compartmentalization. These approaches, however, leave open a more general question: what physical principle could be shared by primitive prebiotic systems and contemporary living cells despite billions of years of biological evolution?This article proposes that life may be understood as a self-sustaining non-equilibrium state of matter in which a continuous flow of free energy and its dissipation enable the system to continually restore its own organization despite molecular fluctuations. Building on Prigogine’s framework of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and dissipative structures 1, we explore the possibility that the fundamental characteristic of life is not a particular molecule, metabolic pathway, or morphology, but a dynamic coupling between fluctuations, energy flows, dissipation, and organizational renewal across multiple spatial and temporal scales.
Peter Mikuláš (2026) studied this question.