
Perry Marshall with physicist Paul Davies at the prize announcement at Arizona State University
A USD $5 million technology prize aims to crack the origin of the genetic code. The Evolution 2.0 Prize was announced at Arizona State University in August 2017. The largest “origin of life” prize to date, it seeks to bridge the gap between chemistry, genomics and modern computing.
Evolution 2.0 prize founder Perry Marshall, an electrical engineer, author and business consultant, became entranced with the parallels between DNA and computer information.
“A good scientific experiment will show how genetic code somehow emerged spontaneously over millions of years”
Several years ago, Marshall wrote a book about industrial Ethernet for the world’s largest society of process engineers. “It occurred to me that the data structure in DNA was strikingly similar to Ethernet,” says Marshall. That led to the Chicago, IL-based engineer-cum-businessman, to think “if genetic code somehow emerged spontaneously over millions of years, as many people believed, then a good scientific experiment will show how.
“After much debate, I realized a way to solve endless arguments about life’s origin was to put a large sum of money on the table and invite people to solve it. After all, crowdsourcing has been successful for inventions in other areas.”
Detractors Think Contest is Unwinnable
The prize is not without its detractors. PZ Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist who believes that genetic code spontaneously emerged and evolved, has debated Marshall in public venues. “I think it’s a sham. There’s no way [Perry Marshall] is going to give the prize to anybody.” Jon Perry of Stated Clearly, a YouTube science channel with more than 170,000 subscribers, is similarly skeptical of the prize. “It’s specifically worded so that he will never have to pay,” he remarked on his blog.
Marshall responds: “If the origin of life can be solved, then someone can win this prize. We ought to be able to demonstrate the process. A scientific model should be reproducible.” He notes that the Miller-Urey experiment in 1953 discovered that chemicals and sparks could generate amino acids. “If an updated version of that experiment produced codes, it would absolutely qualify.”

Perry Marshall
Answer Could Impact Genomics, Medicine, Agriculture, AI
Marshall states that answering the origin of life question this way “will be medically useful. An answer will impact genomics, agriculture, cancer and AI.
“Backers of this prize include a Medical Doctor, an engineer, and several CEOs. They’re involved in Blockchain technology, domain names, investment banking and real estate. They are extremely interested in solving this. We believe it’s a search for an undiscovered law of physics. This could be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time.”
George Church, Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Personal Genome Project, is a member of the judging panel for the Evolution 2.0 Prize. Church echoes Marshall’s optimism: “I would not be surprised if this particular problem is solved in the next five years because considerable amounts of basic relevant nucleic acid chemistry have already been explored. A breakthrough of this magnitude could have a large return on investment.”
Marshall has received numerous submissions from Europe and North America, including proposals from a Canadian PhD candidate in Chemistry at Rice University and a software engineer from Austria. Several entries appear on the company’s website. “Their reasoning is impressive, but nobody has solved it yet,” he says.
A Winning Team Must Produce a Physical Encoder, Message, and Decoder That Self-Organize
The contest, which runs through November 2026, is hosted by HeroX, a crowdsourcing platform with hundreds of sponsors ranging from startups to NASA and Coca-Cola. HeroX is sister to the XPrize foundation founded by Peter Diamandis, who launched the famous $10 million Ansari Prize for Space Flight.
The Evolution 2.0 Prize stipulates that a winning team must produce a physical encoder, message, and decoder that self-organize. “You can’t cheat,” Marshall notes. “Participants can’t sneak design into the equation. The code must emerge naturally given the right initial conditions.”
Marshall offers $100,000 for a solution of any kind; $5 million USD if the approach is patentable. “We seek a patent. Natural Code LLC will pay the patent fees and license the technology.” The firm plans to award the solver both the prize money and partnership in future profits of the company.
“We intend to commercialize this technology,” Marshall says. “Can Siri ‘wake up’? We hope to find out. We believe this will be very attractive to Apple, Google, and many biotech and venture capital firms.”
Physicist Paul Davies, director of the BEYOND Center at Arizona State University, proposes that rather than being a mere byproduct of life, information is central to life and its origin. Davies and physicist Sara Imari Walker compare the origin of genetic information to the famous Hard Problem of Consciousness. They call the information problem ‘The Hard Problem of Life,’ saying it’s a question of how information can control chemistry, rather than the other way around.
University of Oxford Professor Denis Noble is one of three judges for the Evolution 2.0 Prize. Noble says, “The very word ‘code’ implies that someone or something decided what the code should be. If life arose by itself, then there must have been a natural process by which the coding could have arisen. Was that purely serendipitous? Or was it physically inevitable that the code should have arisen? Or something very like it?
“If it was inevitable, what algorithm could achieve that? That must be one of the biggest challenges there could be in science.”
Evolution is More Than Random Mutation and Selection
Noble developed the first computer model of a human organ in 1960, which was the heart. His research made pacemakers possible and led to the development of the drug Ivabradine. A long-time critic of conventional evolutionary theory, Noble authored the paper “Physiology is rocking the foundations of evolutionary biology.”
Two books and a famous keynote he delivered to the International Congress of Physiology challenge the standard Neo-Darwinian synthesis. As a Fellow at Britain’s Royal Society, Noble organized a 2016 conference there which explored an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, proposing there’s more to evolution than just random mutation and selection.
In his paper “Was the Watchmaker Blind? Or Was She One-Eyed?” published December 2017 in the refereed journal Biology, Noble writes, “Evolution may have no foresight, but it is at least partially directed by organisms themselves and by the populations of which they form a part.”
Efforts to exchange insights between biology and computer science are not new. A recent article in Front Line Genomics details how machine learning tasks require orders of magnitude more computing power than the human brain. ‘Neuromorphic’ hardware created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology mimics neuron behavior.
George Church leads Synthetic Biology at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, where he oversees directed evolution of molecules, polymers, and whole genomes, and is a leader in the development of CRISPR. Church says, “It seems plausible that cell biological computers [brains] are already more versatile and have lower power consumption. Also, biotechnology is improving exponentially five-fold faster than electronic [Moore’s law]. Synthetic biology might be a shortcut to getting AI to use atomic precision inexpensively and at large scale.
“There are several problems in which computing of complex quantum systems (like protein folding and function) can be accomplished a billion-fold faster by synthesizing proteins, than by using modern silicon/electronics-based computing for simulations.”
Perry Marshall suspects that the origin of code and the natural genetic engineering of cells share common physical causes. “Bacteria re-arrange their DNA to fight antibiotics in minutes. Cell AI is 1000X superior to anything from Silicon Valley. We need to discover what makes this possible.”
“If Microsoft knew what bacteria know, their stock price would spike 10X”
He says, “Windows can’t evolve without programmers. But bacteria evolve by themselves in minutes. What do bacteria know that we don’t? If Microsoft knew what bacteria know, their stock price would spike 10X.”
Michael Ruse, a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University, is the third member of the judging panel for the Evolution 2.0 Prize. Ruse says, “I regard this as one of the most fascinating and yet ultimately soluble scientific problems that we have, and I would love to know the answer. I am a bit dubious about information theory, and that is why I am involved. I will do my best to knock down anything that comes up, and no one will be more delighted than I if I fail. It’s a win-win situation.”
To learn more about the Evolution 2.0 Prize, visit: www.herox.com/evolution2.0
Find out what George Church himself had to say about the competition when we interviewed him!
Pseudo-scientific nonsense. This article caters to the anti-science fringe while trying to sound like it’s looking for answers.
if the money is there and there are concrete rules on how to win the prize, why sour grape it? win it if you know something we don’t. or better yet, increase the stakes and come up with your own contest. sincerely.
Is there a FORMULA FOR LIFE?
Yes!
https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/deciphering-hidden-dna-metacodes-the-great-unification–mastercode-of-biology-2153-0637-1000131.php?aid=55261
Send me a ticket , put me in a and and let me come give the speech I already have ready to go…
Six (6) CODES of LIFE: http://vixra.org/abs/1801.0129
How about, “And the Lord said, ‘Let there be…’ And there was!”
I hope everyone sees the real end game here: Marshall and his friends want to steal and/or copy the inventions of others in the end to enrich themselves. These guys are sophisticated con artists who seem very credible on the surface.
I believe the best way to come up with some answers is to start looking at all that exist and ask yourself how each item originated from a Mosquito to an elephant and airplane, toothpick, shark, Facebook, Scientist, it seems many things originated from a need ? Could the shark have came along to slow down ocean population ? who or what made the decision of the need for the shark? Could there be automatic built in countermeasures to this system of things ?
How did the existence of existence come about ? The world seems to be on autopilot/ or automatic and all things set in motion are designed with counter measures so who set that up ? Are we all in a test tube with people watching us and doing experiments?
I like the idea of look into and test everything you can think of How did it come about ? was it because of need ? did someone put it in place ? what caused the protection to be activated ? along this path you might can come up with some answers . ?
Then again I have some of the worlds biggest discoveries and no one will look into them or pay attention I suppose because of the way I present it and no peer review.
Hell you just might find answers to you question if you looked into my 42 years of research because there is much more to learn from my discoveries.
Seriously ! There are perhaps no bigger discoveries than my 42 years of research and discoveries I have from that.
FYI- I have discovered that there has always been a way that images of people , animals, events and more have been saved or stored and I can get these images all day long every day of the year. There is a way that these images move out into the universe and they can be seen . I {CAN} open a whole new world in astronomy and so much so that astronomers will realize they have only been practicing until I come along. Not that I can reach out further but I can teach them how to see and what they are missing. So much to see—Back here on earth and other planets I can teach many unknown facts about the geology of planets that is unknown . It is not that hard to do and most all of you that are much smarter than I am can do much more with what I have discovered than I can. In the near future I will be checking out of this system of things and I wish I could see what all can be done with my discoveries before I go…………………………………………………..
Come learn of my 42 years of research and of my discoveries and keep your money —My discoveries just might give you the answers you want.
There has always been a way that the earth saved/stored images of people , animals, events and more and I can get these images from the earth all day long every day of the year. —I Can teach you may things about the earth that are unknown and things about geology that are unknown.
I can open a whole new world in astronomy and so much so that astronomers will realize they have only been practicing until I come along.
I can teach you things about Planets and workings going on in the universe and much more. —-It is free for anyone smart enough to believe and look into this and it just might give the answers you seek …………….AND MORE. I have been trying to get people involved or looking into this for many years to no avail . What happened to believe or trust ? Sure I would love money but Most of all I would love the world to know these things before I die and if I die I doubt you will ever find the things I have found.
take the plunge and learn………………………………Thanks So far in many years I have not found people smart enough to look into my research.
Please share what you’ve found. Publish for peer review. This challenge is to promote ID.
Abiogenises has already been proven. We exist as life forms. What else could have happened, magic?
The test should to prey to the inteligent designer. “When ever two or more gather in my name,” and all that crap. Prey to it again to prove the superstition of the god belief.
If it happens than the story is true.
If not then keep the nonexistent money. And read a book.
Ahahaha! WHY BOTHER? Scientific fact: since when, much less how, can anything come from nothing??? How can zero, or nothing, develope any thing. Dead and void can only produce dead and void. A life force must be present to produce any life force or form and even the Bible explains and states “In the beginning, God created……..”!!! Where do you people get your college credits??? Did they evolve from nothing or did it get created some where from nothing. Amazing. Simple. Profound. Well. Til another time. Now that you have an answer send a little prize money. Later.
The Origin of Species is a “”Name” spoken”” (engineered in DNA) by the Father through His Son – The Word. There only had to be one name and one original DNA code for each species because from there everything concerning that particular “in kind” DNA “name” (Whale, Bird, Man) can be explained by Meiosis, Entropy, Technology and Evolution. The dynamic of “naming” is in itself creative just as The Word is creative in itself and be assured it does not return void. The Creator is real and beyond anything we can think or imagine but science helps by giving us little glimpses of just how real and just how awesome.
The reason this whole question is futile is because what is really being sought is an example of something coming from nothing, or with out a cause…and if that COULD actually occur, science as a way to know anything at all…is finished. As D.r Meyer shows in his boo signature in the cel…no matter what level is examined looking for the “thing” that creates itself and starts the process of so called “evolving”…there is always a an invisible cause that actually “puts things in order”. The reason life could never have been caused by “chance” is because chance can’t DO anything . Its just a human construct describing probability…and is nothing more than our ignorance of real causes. If its real,,,it has a cause and it hasn’t caused itself. Any sixth fgrader knows that much.
GOD SITS IN HEAVEN AND LAUGHS AND KNOW WONDER
Abiogenesis is a lot like evolution itself. Just keep saying its a fact and there will be folks who will go long with it. That’s fine..its a free country (sort of).just do not call it science.
What if there was something OUTSIDE of the system that influenced it? No self-assembly or self-whatever. That would point at a “supreme being” that manipulated amino acids into RNA/DNA. If I could prove that, would I get the 5 million? Actually, the book sales would probably do that …
“What if there was something OUTSIDE of the system that influenced it?” When you think about it…that is the ONLY possibility. It is obvious that in order to even HAVE a physical reality…..whatever caused it has to be outside of what it creates. Its the old Painter/painting scenario….. NO panter…no paintING…ever!. Now…we do not have to call that “possibility” …God if that offends…but just what WOULD you call the entity that caused all physical reality to b???? …and we think we need a PHd to understand this!!
Anyone who an think critically has to be amazed at all the Phd’s are making fools of themselves attempting to pull the rabbit out of the hat, without a hat, rabbit or magician. Seriously…..respect for higher education is obviously grossly overrated. Being able to hold oodles of data in your head does not a wise man make. When you throw out the most basic assumptions regarding how we can know anything at all, such as the Laws of Causality, non contradiction, and objective truth there is no end to the silliness that man can dream up. Send me the 5 million Perry, I’ve just saved you from a lifetime o futility.
If the genetic code evolved by itself why is it so consistent. Why no variation? Why only left handed amino acids used in proteins? Why aren’t other code systems found. Code doesn’t just write itself. DNA and RNA are just a couple of the mysteries within. How do motor protein recognize proteins, find the proper route, and deliver to specific locations.
John…..they will say the code is so consistent and uniform because all the “inconsistent” parts of it were “selected out”. The right handed amino acids were not conducive to life and so only left hand ones were selected FOR. They will not touch the question…”What drives the selection of ANY particular acid sequence. Evolution…supposedly being a random chance phenomenon, cannot possibly have ANY purpose or goal. It just happens because evolution is a fact. So much for the scientific method.
Your anti pseudo science skepticism is your crutch.
You know nothing except the language
you’ve been programmed with.
You’re not going to get anywhere close to truth without realizing that all word are half truths.
Gfy
Why do all words have to be “half truth? How do you know all words are ‘half truth”?? Answer….. you don’t. You are merely trying desperately to add something to the conversation. Language works just fine for communicating ideas.. There are a few aproriori’s that need to be in place for sure…but as long as we are clear on defintions of terms …we are home free.
This is the answer for that in Persian. you can translate it. It’s my theory.
http://yon.ir/XV001
this is the answers in Persian
http://yon.ir/XV000
You can translate it to English but there are some problems I include them in this speech because of copy write. I’m leaving in Iran and talking about this things are political problem in my country they they will terrorize or arrest me because of these things. Therefore I can not describe it in details.