Related papers: Modelling Early Transitions Toward Autonomous Prot…
A phenomenological model of self-organization explaining the emergence of a complexity with features that apparently satisfy the specific criteria usually required for recognizing the appearance of life in laboratory is presented. The…
Biological organisms are composed of numerous interconnected biochemical processes. Diseases occur when normal functionality of these processes is disrupted. Thus, understanding these biochemical processes and their interrelationships is a…
The growth, form, and division of prebiotic vesicles, membraneous bags of fluid of varying components and shapes is hypothesized to have served as the substrate for the origin of life. The dynamics of these out-of-equilibrium structures is…
According to the universally accepted concept of the development of life on the Earth, multicellular organisms initially emerged as a result of either the union of identical unicellular organisms with the following functional…
Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
Cellular life requires the presence of a set of biochemical mechanisms in order to maintain a predictable process of growth and division. Several attempts have been made towards the building of minimal protocells from a top-down approach,…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
Protocells are supposed to have played a key role in the self-organizing processes leading to the emergence of life. Existing models either (i) describe protocell architecture and dynamics, given the existence of sets of collectively…
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A key question for the origin of life, is then how can…
The study of biological cells in terms of mesoscopic, nonequilibrium, nonlinear, stochastic dynamics of open chemical systems provides a paradigm for other complex, self-organizing systems with ultra-fast stochastic fluctuations, short-time…
It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…
The minimal requirements for life are autopoiesis and cognition. We propose autopoietic models with cognition and perform three classes of evolutionary simulation. In our models the plasticity of the metabolic cycle and the regulation…
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
The managed-metabolism hypothesis suggests that a cooperation barrier must be overcome if self-producing chemical organizations are to transition from non-life to life. This barrier prevents un-managed, self-organizing, autocatalytic…
Creating autonomous, self-supporting, self-replicating, sustainable systems is a great challenge. To some extent, understanding life means not only being able to create it from scratch, but also improving, supporting, saving it, or even…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
The dominant paradigm in origin of life research is that of an RNA world. However, despite experimental progress towards the spontaneous formation of RNA, the RNA world hypothesis still has its problems. Here, we introduce a novel…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…