Using Math to Explain How Life on Earth Began

Back in March the press went crazy for Martin A. Nowak’s study on the value of punishment. A Harvard University mathematician and biologist, Nowak had signed up some 100 students to play a computer game in which they used dimes to punish and reward one another. The popular belief was that costly punishment would promote cooperation between two equals, but Nowak and his colleagues proved the theory wrong. Instead they found that punishment often triggers a spiral of retaliation, making it detrimental and destructive rather than beneficial. Far from gaining, people who punish tend to escalate conflict, worsen their fortunes and eventually lose out. “Nice guys finish first,” headlines cheered.

It wasn’t the first time Nowak’s computer simulations and mathematics forced a rethinking of a complex phenomenon. In 2002 he worked out equations that can predict the way cancer evolves and spreads, such as when mutations emerge in a metastasis and chromosomes become unstable. And in the early 1990s his model of disease progression demonstrated that HIV develops into AIDS only when the virus replicates fast enough so that the diversity of strains reaches a critical level, one that overwhelms the immune system. Immunologists later found out he had the mechanism right [see “How HIV Defeats the Immune System,” by Martin A. Nowak and Andrew J. McMichael; Scientific American, August 1995]. Now Nowak is out to do it again, this time by modeling the origin of life. Specifically, he is trying to capture “the transition from no life to life,” he says.