Related papers: Origin of life in a digital microcosm
The role of historical contingency in the origin of life is one of the great unknowns in modern science. Only one example of life exists--one that proceeded from a single self-replicating organism (or a set of replicating hyper-cycles) to…
The most prominent property of life on Earth is its ability to evolve. It is often taken for granted that self-replication--the characteristic that makes life possible--implies evolvability, but many examples such as the lack of…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…
Artificial Life provides the opportunity to study the emergence and evolution of simple ecosystems in real time. We give an overview of the advantages and limitations of such an approach, as well as its relation to individual-based modeling…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
With unprecedented advances in genetic engineering we are starting to see progressively more original examples of synthetic life. As such organisms become more common it is desirable to be able to distinguish between natural and artificial…
Based on the oligomer-world hypothesis we propose an abstract model where the molecular recognition among oligomers is described in the shape space. The origin of life in the oligomer world is regarded as the establishment of a metabolic…
Recent computational experiments have demonstrated the spontaneous emergence of self-replicating programs across universal automata, artificial chemistries, and self-modifying code systems. Remarkably, these results arise without explicit…
Researchers in the field of biocomputing have, for many years, successfully "harvested and exploited" the natural world for inspiration in developing systems that are robust, adaptable and capable of generating novel and even "creative"…
We investigate the evolutionary processes behind the development and optimization of multiple threads of execution in digital organisms using the avida platform, a software package that implements Darwinian evolution on populations of…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Artificial organisms are computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. How do these lifelike information-processing behaviours could arise in diverse far-from-equilibrium physical systems remains an open question. Here,…
We propose a generic model of eco-systems, with a {\it hierarchical} food web structure. In our computer simulations we let the eco-system evolve continuously for so long that that we can monitor extinctions as well as speciations over…
The origin of life can be understood mathematically to be the origin of information that can replicate. The likelihood that entropy spontaneously becomes information can be calculated from first principles, and depends exponentially on the…
The aim of this essay is to analyze the role of quantum mechanics as an inherent characteristic of life. During the last ten years the problem of the origin of life has become an innovative research subject approached by many authors. The…
We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypotheses have known difficulties: All known evolvable molecular…
Even the simplest organisms are too complex to have spontaneously arisen fully-formed, yet precursors to first life must have emerged ab initio from their environment. A watershed event was the appearance of the first entity capable of…