Related papers: Selection first path to the origin of life
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
A central biological question is how natural organisms are so evolvable (capable of quickly adapting to new environments). A key driver of evolvability is the widespread modularity of biological networks--their organization as functional,…
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…
Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
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…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
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…
This paper develops a quasispecies model where cells can adopt a two-cell survival strategy. Within this strategy, pairs of cells join together, at which point one of the cells sacrifices its own replicative ability for the sake of the…
The theory of interaction-based evolution argues that, at the most basic level of analysis, there is a third alternative for how adaptive evolution works besides a) accidental mutation and natural selection and b) Lamarckism, namely, c)…
This thesis broadly concerns the origins of life problem, pursuing a joint approach that combines general philosophical/conceptual reflection on the problem along with more detailed and formal scientific modelling work oriented in the…
Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life. A polymer longer than 40--100 nucleotides is necessary to expect a self-replicating activity, but the…
Living organisms have some common structures, chemical reactions and molecular structures. The organisms consist of cells with cell division, they have homochirality of protein and carbohydrate units, and metabolism, and genetics, and they…
This chapter is an overview of foundational results in the mathematical theory of replicator systems. Its primary aim is to provide a unified framework for the mathematical formalisation of evolutionary processes in the spirit of…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…
This paper presents and tests a previously unrecognised mechanism for driving a replicating molecular system on the prebiotic earth. It is proposed that cell-free RNA replication in the primordial soup may have been driven by self-sustained…
Cell reproduction involves replication of diverse molecule species, in contrast to simple replication system with fewer components. Here, we address why such diversity is sustained despite the efficiency of simple replication systems, using…
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 origin of life must have been preceded by Darwin-like evolutionary dynamics that could propagate it. How did that adaptive dynamics arise? And from what prebiotic molecules? Using evolutionary invasion analysis, we develop a universal…
We consider the relationship between thermodynamics, fitness, and Darwinian selection in autocatalytic molecular replicators. We uncover a thermodynamic bound that relates fitness, replication rate, and thermodynamic affinity of…