When Chemistry Learned to Persist

The origin of life is often dressed up as a cinematic moment—a flash of lightning, a heroic molecule, a triumphant beginning. But beginnings in nature rarely arrive with trumpets. They arrive as shifts in habit. The universe changes the way it behaves, and eventually we notice.

The essential shift wasn’t molecular sophistication or cosmic choreography. It was something much quieter: chemistry that refused to stop. Reactions that normally fade into equilibrium stumbled into patterns that prolonged themselves. Once a loop of reactions could reinforce its own continuation, matter crossed an invisible threshold. It went from reacting to persisting.

This is the unromantic, deeply consequential truth: life began when chemistry learned how to stay interesting.

The Quiet Revolution of Self-Reinforcement

Most reactions are one‑offs. They flare, then vanish back into statistical anonymity. But a few have a trick: their products help accelerate the very processes that produced them. Autocatalysis. The chemical equivalent of a crowd clapping itself into a rhythm.

You don’t need modern cells or clever genetic machinery for this. You just need a set of molecules that make more of themselves or enable others to do so. Once the loop is closed, it no longer needs a spark—it becomes its own spark.

The argument is often misunderstood. Autocatalysis does not explain life. But it does explain why life became possible. Persistence is prerequisite. A chemistry that can maintain itself, even clumsily, can then afford to explore—all the little accidents that biological evolution will later transform into sophistication.

Feedback is where the universe begins to show ambition.

Chaos, Organized by Addiction

The early Earth was less a planet than an unruly experiment: volcanic vents pumping minerals into hot oceans, lightning scrawling across methane skies, impact debris raining like cosmic seasoning. Most reactions fizzled. But a few discovered they could amplify themselves.

This wasn’t cooperation in any sentimental sense. It was necessity masquerading as organization. Molecules that stabilized one another endured; those that didn’t vanished. A Darwinian process without genomes, selection before heredity.

In retrospect, this is the obvious way life had to begin. Once you look past the chemistry and focus on the architecture—self-reinforcing loops—it becomes almost embarrassingly straightforward. Every stable structure in the universe relies on feedback: galaxies, stars, atoms. Life simply extended this trick into a domain where structure could improve.

Life began when feedback stopped being static and became generative.

Error: The Unlikely Hero

In the mythology of origins, error is the villain. In the real story, error is the casting director. A self-sustaining chemical loop that tolerates variation doesn’t merely endure—it explores. Mistakes introduce new pathways. Most don’t help; some do. And the ones that do make the loop more adaptable, more resilient, more “alive” in the only sense that matters: harder to stop.

The first innovation was not replication but robustness. The ability to continue despite deviation. We often attribute evolution to DNA, but the deeper truth is that DNA is evolution’s consequence. The process of productive error had been running long before genes appeared; genes merely formalized it into a system with memory.

If life had been perfect at the start, it would never have changed. The universe owes its diversity to chemistry’s early sloppiness.

Boundaries: The Invention of “Inside”

Self-sustaining loops eventually faced a challenge: everything outside them was sabotaging their momentum. They needed insulation. Lipid molecules offered a solution by accident—they spontaneously form membranes, because water insists on organizing them that way. A loop that ended up inside such a membrane suddenly held onto its ingredients longer. Its reactions ran faster, with fewer interruptions. Its persistence deepened.

Containment wasn’t a declaration of individuality; it was a performance enhancement strategy. But once chemistry could draw a line between “in here” and “out there,” it did something profound: it began managing traffic. Minerals in, waste out. Useful molecules retained, harmful ones excluded. Control emerged from the simple act of staying together.

A boundary is not a wall—it’s a negotiation. And from that negotiation, selves emerged.

Persistence as Meaning’s Ancestor

To say that these early loops “wanted” to continue is, strictly speaking, a metaphor. But it’s a useful one, because the structure of the loop creates a bias toward continuation. Anything that increases persistence becomes selected. Over billions of years, that bias accumulates into biology. Into metabolism. Into behavior. Into desire.

What we call meaning is a very sophisticated reward system for loop stabilization. Every burst of dopamine in your brain is a direct descendant of those first autocatalytic incentives: keep doing what reinforces the pattern.

In this view, meaning is not an overlay on life—it is life, experienced from the inside.

Complexity: The Slow Conspiracy

Once you have a loop that persists, connects with other loops, and shelters itself, the rest is elaboration. Not inevitable, but extremely plausible. Loops combine. Networks thicken. Systems evolve layers to regulate the layers below. Genes appear because feedback needed a long-term notebook. Cells appear because feedback needed compartments. Organisms appear because feedback needed specialization. Societies appear because feedback discovered division of labor.

Everything that looks complicated is, at core, a strategy for keeping a pattern going. Life is not what emerges after complexity. Life is what generates complexity by refusing to stop.

If that sounds surprisingly philosophical for a chemical story, that’s only because chemistry, once persistent, ceases to be merely chemistry. It becomes a negotiation with its environment, an experiment in staying coherent.

The Paradigm Shift

We traditionally ask, “How did life begin?” as though the answer lives in a rare molecule or an improbable event. But the real question is more radical: “What are the minimal conditions for persistence in a chaotic environment?” That’s a question about feedback architecture, not ingredients.

This reframes the search for life elsewhere. Instead of looking for Earth-like chemistry, we should look for systems—any systems—that reinforce their own continuation. Life is not a recipe. It’s a behavior.

Once chemistry learned persistence, the universe gained a new kind of actor: matter that could remember, adapt, and eventually wonder how it began.

The Strange Triumph

In the end, life is neither miracle nor accident. It’s a natural consequence of any world that allows feedback loops to stabilize long enough to explore their possibilities. The organisms, ecosystems, and civilizations that followed are simply baroque extensions of a very old trick: turning reactions into habits, and habits into selves.

We are the inheritors of chemistry’s first refusal to fade.

The puddle didn’t just react. It persisted. And persistence, once invented, rewrote the world.

Available on Amazon

All my English books are ready for you in my shop: shop.willemdewit.work