Experimental quantification of material complexity for origin-of-life hypotheses

Develop experimental measurement protocols and computational methodologies to measure, calculate, and investigate the structural complexity of abiotic materials, including inorganic molecules and crystalline solids, so that hypotheses about the causal role of material complexity in the emergence of genetic information at the origin of life can be empirically tested.

Background

The paper motivates the need for experimentally testable measures of material complexity in the context of origins-of-life research. It argues that abiotic materials such as minerals and clays may have contained structural configurations that influenced pre-genetic chemistry, but current complexity measures (e.g., information-theoretic metrics) lack direct experimental grounding.

Assembly Theory is proposed as a framework to quantify complexity via assembly indices and assembly pathways, but the authors highlight that a concrete, empirically tractable methodology for measuring and investigating material complexity—particularly for abiotic systems implicated in the origin of genetic information—remains unresolved.