From Tree of Life to Web of Life — The Origin of Life Complexity

The evolution of life on Earth exhibits a specific direction - the "arrow of life" from simplicity towards complexity, from simple prokaryotes to complex eukaryotes, from unicellular to multicellular organisms. This lecture plans to discuss the origin of life complexity from four aspects: the Tree of Life and its underlying logic, evolution independent of environmental randomness, information exchange between the world of life and the environment, and the intrinsic network linking the world of life.

This lecture is co-hosted by Berggruen Research Center of Peking University and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities of Zhejiang University.

Speaker:

WU Jiarui
Researcher, CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science
2023 - 2024 Berggruen Fellow

Ph.D. from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He is currently a researcher at the CAS Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science (Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology) and Director of the National Protein Science Research Facility (Shanghai) at the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, CAS. Wu’s main research areas include protein regulatory networks in cellular activities and systems biology research on complex diseases. He has published over 100 research papers in international academic journals.

Moderator:

BAI Shunong
Emeritus Professor, School of Life Sciences, Peking University
2020 - 2021 Berggruen Fellow

Mainly focusing on plant biology, he has explored various plant developmental events to different degrees. Following the concept of "plant development unit" proposed in 1993, he also concluded the concept of "sexual reproductive cycle" in 2011, and then "plant development program" in 2013. Despite of working on plant developmental biology, he also thinks for a long time on the nature of life, the nature of education and the training goals of undergraduate life science education.