Why Evolution Cannot Be Invoked Before Life Exists
The attempt to explain the integrated whole
in terms of its primitive parts remains,
quite literally, outside the realm of science
Evolution Before Life? The Conceptual Cost of Continuity
by John D. Wise, PhD
Most evolutionary accounts of life’s history maintain a careful distance from the origin of life (OOL) itself. This boundary is well-known: evolution explains what happens after life begins, while the OOL remains a separate, unresolved chemical problem.
One of the things I appreciate about Eugene V. Koonin is that he does not maintain the party line. In The Logic of Chance (2012) and in a recent paper with Mart Krupovic in PLOS Biology, Koonin does something far more ambitious.
The Selfish Ribosome (Koonin and Krupovic, PLOS Biology, 21 April 2026). The authors propose that ribosomes (DNA translation machines) were selfish entities evolving by natural selection until “other cellular componentry” underwent a “ribosomal takeover,” creating LUCA: the last universal cellular ancestor of all living things.
Rather than insulating evolutionary theory from the origin question, he extends it deliberately into that domain. He does not retreat. Instead, Koonin takes the logic on which his discipline stands seriously.
That is what I try to do as well.
Simplified portrayal of a ribosome: messenger RNA in, protein out. (Illustra Media)
The Annexation of Chemistry
Standard evolutionary theory maintains the distinction between OOL and evolutionary biology. Formally, the claim is methodological: biological evolution operates where replication, variation, and selection are already in place.
That is what life is, and biology is the study of life.
In practice, however, this boundary functions as a point of insulation, allowing evolutionary explanation to proceed while the origin of the very conditions that make such explanation possible remains speculative – even, on Koonin’s own account, statistically impossible within any finite scenario.[1]
Any account of life’s origin must therefore account, in some form, for the emergence of ribosomal translation. It is here that the difficulty can no longer be deferred.
The Ribosome as Test Case
Ribosomes are not peripheral components of life; they are the
“quintessential, universal component of all cellular life forms.”
They are the central mechanism of translation, the system that converts genetic information into functional proteins, the ‘stuff of life.’ Without them, there is no biology as we know it.
Koonin and Krupovic do not shy away from this. In their account, the ribosome grows through a long process of structural accretion, beginning in an RNA-dominated world and only gradually incorporating proteins. By the time of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA), it has already reached essentially modern dimensions.
Subsequent evolution of the ribosome … involved a vast increase in size and complexity that occurred at early stages of evolution so that by the time of the LUCA, about 4 billion years ago, it had already reached the dimensions of the modern prokaryotic ribosomes.
They describe this growth in explicitly evolutionary terms: selection for increased efficiency, adaptive refinement of structure, and the evolution of increasingly elaborate metabolic networks to sustain it.
That clarity is refreshing. But it raises a nagging problem. For terms like “selection” and “adaptation” to do explanatory work, a system capable of replication and heritable variation must already be in place. In other words, something recognizably biological must already be present. Yet those conditions are precisely what origin-of-life research is tasked with explaining.
The Cost of Continuity
To avoid this “hard” boundary, Koonin extends the reach of evolutionary explanation in two directions.
First, he allows for ‘pre-Darwinian evolution,’ in which chemical systems exhibit selection-like behavior prior to the existence of fully formed cells. Second, when the improbabilities involved in assembling a translation system become prohibitive, he expands the frame outward, invoking cosmological models in which an effectively unbounded ensemble of worlds renders even extraordinarily unlikely events inevitable … somewhere.
Together, these moves preserve a single, unbroken narrative – the evolutionary story. But this continuity comes at a conceptual cost. What appears as continuity is achieved not by resolving the transition, but by narrowing it until it no longer interrupts the account. This becomes particularly clear in the way the ribosome itself is described.
In the paper, Koonin and Krupovic frame the ribosome’s history as a “ribosomal takeover,” where a molecular machine evolved to “consume most of the cell’s resources.” This is not a metaphor; it is a physical audit. They note that in a fast-growing bacterial cell, translation accounts for “at least 50% of the energy expenditure in a fast growing bacterial cell,” while ribosomal RNA constitutes a staggering “~95%–98% of the total cellular RNA.”
By emphasizing these massive physical footprints, the authors treat the ribosome as a
“complex symbiont… with pronounced selfish properties.”
The language is striking. The ribosome appears almost as a governing agent – a “selfish” entity driving the cell’s evolution to serve its own propagation.
Derivative Agency
Yet the ribosome is not itself a replicator. It does not reproduce; it does not vary independently, and it does not compete as a lineage-bearing entity. All of those properties belong to the larger system that encodes and maintains it. Its apparent “agency,” so central to the thesis of this paper, is therefore derivative. What evolves, in the strict sense, is not the ribosome in isolation, but the integrated cellular systems in which ribosomal structures are embedded.
This brings the argument back to its central point. The evolutionary account depends, at every stage, on the existence of a system already capable of storing, reproducing, and expressing information.
Everything depends, that is, on the system we call “life.”
The strategy of expansion – extending evolutionary reasoning backward and probability outward – follows a familiar pattern. When a system resists local, causal explanation, the frame is simply enlarged until the improbable is labeled “inevitable.”
But expansion is not explanation.
By invoking an unbounded ensemble of worlds to account for the “selfish” emergence of the ribosome, Koonin and Krupovic are essentially pointing to the inexplicable existence of a surd – an irreducible starting point that their theory cannot derive but must assume.
The Wisdom of Pasteur’s Empiricism
There is deep irony here. In their effort to bridge the chemical and the biological, they have inadvertently returned us to the fundamental law established by Louis Pasteur: Omne vivum ex vivo – all life comes from life.
By labeling the ribosome a “symbiont” and a “selfish agent,” they are forced to treat it as if it were already alive in order to explain how it became part of a living system. It is a brilliant, highly sophisticated circle. Their narrative details the evolutionary refinement of a machine that could not have existed, in any functional sense, prior to the emergence of the system it is said to have annexed.
In the end, the “Selfish Ribosome” does not tell a story of gradual chemical improvement. It marks the hard boundary where the narrative requires a system already capable of sustaining the processes invoked to explain it.
Life happened.
And as Pasteur realized over a century ago, the attempt to explain the integrated whole in terms of its primitive parts remains, quite literally, outside the realm of science.
[1] Quoting Koonin: “In other words, even in this toy model that assumes a deliberately inflated rate of RNA production, the probability that a coupled translation replication emerges by chance in a single O-region is
P < 10–1,018.
Obviously, this version of the breakthrough stage can be considered only in the context of a universe with an infinite (or, at the very least, extremely vast) number of O-regions.” Logic of Chance, p. 435. Emphasis mine.
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.