Related papers: Selection first path to the origin of life
Ultraviolet light incident on organic material can initiate its spontaneous dissipative structuring into chromophores which can then catalyze their own replication. This may have been the case for one of the most ancient of all chromophores…
Template directed replication of nucleic acids is at the essence of all living beings and a major milestone for any origin of life scenario. We here present an idealized model of prebiotic sequence replication, where binary polymers act as…
The antibody repertoire of each individual is continuously updated by the evolutionary process of B cell receptor mutation and selection. It has recently become possible to gain detailed information concerning this process through…
Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…
Large language models increasingly rely on explicit reasoning chains and can produce multiple plausible responses for a given context. We study the candidate sampler that produces the set of plausible responses contrasting the ancestral…
Consider a population of organisms that harvest free energy from their environment to reproduce. This paper shows that if the organisms' reproductive rates are proportional to the amount of physical free energy that they can convert into…
In living systems, we often see the emergence of the ingredients necessary for computation -- the capacity for information transmission, storage, and modification -- begging the question of how we may exploit or imitate such biological…
One of the leading theories for the origin of life includes the hypothesis according to which life would have evolved as cooperative networks of molecules. Explaining cooperation$-$and particularly, its emergence in favoring the evolution…
Background: Speciation corresponds to the progressive establishment of reproductive barriers between groups of individuals derived from an ancestral stock. Since Darwin did not believe that reproductive barriers could be selected for, he…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…
Systems biology approaches combining theoretical modeling with experiments have been singularly successful in uncovering novel features of cellular phenomena. One such feature is that of binary gene expression in which the expression level…
We describe the evolution of macromolecules as an information transmission process and apply tools from Shannon information theory to it. This allows us to isolate three independent, competing selective pressures that we term compression,…
In their recent comment, Cockell et al. argue that the habitability of an environment is fundamentally a binary property; that is to say, an environment can either support the metabolic processes of a given organism or not. The habitability…
Replication of genetic material is an important process for all living organisms. Origins of replication initiate the copying of DNA at many points on a chromosome, and it is the distribution of these points that is relevant here, as it…
The cell cycle is a tightly controlled process, yet its underlying genetic network shows marked differences across species. Which of the associated structural features follow solely from the ability to impose the appropriate gene expression…
The search for extraterrestrial life hinges on identifying biosignatures, often focusing on gaseous metabolic byproducts as indicators. However, most such biosignatures require assuming specific metabolic processes. It is widely recognized…
Recent experimental evidence suggests that acute myeloid leukemias may originate from multiple clones of malignant cells. Nevertheless it is not known how the observed clones may differ with respect to cell properties such as proliferation…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
All living organisms use the same genetic languages in their molecular biology machinery. They can be understood as the optimal solutions to the replication tasks involving DNA and proteins. These solutions perfectly fit the pattern…