Related papers: Selection first path to the origin of life
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
According to the "hard-steps" model, the origin of humanity required "successful passage through a number of intermediate steps" (so-called "hard" or "critical" steps) that were intrinsically improbable with respect to the total time…
The evolution of complex cellular life involved two major transitions: the encapsulation of self-replicating genetic entities into cellular units and the aggregation of individual genes into a collectively replicating genome. In this paper,…
We present a simple physical model that recapitulates several features of biological evolution, while being based only on thermally-driven attachment and detachment of elementary building blocks. Through its dynamics, this model samples a…
One of the great challenges in science is determining when, where, why, and how life first arose as well as the form taken by this life. In the present study, life was assumed to be (1) bounded, (2) replicating, (3) able to inherit…
A protocell model consisting of mutually catalyzing molecules is studied in order to investigate how chemical compositions are transferred recursively through cell divisions under replication errors. Depending on the path rate, the numbers…
Tandem duplication is an evolutionary process whereby a segment of DNA is replicated and proximally inserted. The different configurations that can arise from this process give rise to some interesting combinatorial questions. Firstly, we…
Dawkins' replicator-based conception of evolution has led to widespread mis-application selectionism across the social sciences because it does not address the paradox that inspired the theory of natural selection in the first place: how do…
We consider a sequential cascade of molecular first-reaction events towards a terminal reaction centre in which each reaction step is controlled by diffusive motion of the particles. The model studied here represents a typical reaction…
It has been argued that the limited set of proteins used by life as we know it could not have arisen by the process of Darwinian selection from all possible proteins. This probabilistic argument has a number of implicit assumptions that may…
Traditionally evolution is seen as a process where from a pool of possible variations of a population (e.g. biological species or industrial goods) a few variations get selected which survive and proliferate, whereas the others vanish.…
It is often stated that there are no laws in biology, where everything is contingent and could have been otherwise, being solely the result of historical accidents. Furthermore, the customary introduction of fundamental biological entities…
In an attempt to explain the uniqueness of the coding mechanism of living cells as contrasted with multi-species structure of ecosystems we examine two models of individuals with some replicative properties. In the first model the system…
The universality of many pathways of core metabolism suggests a strong role for evolutionary selection, but it remains unclear whether existing pathways have been selected from a large or small set of biochemical possibilities. To address…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
Life on earth is distinguished by long-lived correlations in time. The patterns of material organization that characterize living organisms today are contingent on events that occurred billions of years ago. This contingency is a necessary…
We investigate the one-dimensional telegraph random process in the presence of an elastic boundary at the origin. This process describes a finite-velocity random motion that alternates between two possible directions of motion (positive or…
The origin of life is one of the greatest mysteries. The mechanism for the synthesis of DNA is synonymous with the chemical origin of life, and theories have been developed along many lines of reasoning, but resolving all requirements…
An object-oriented combinator chemistry was used to construct an artificial organism with a system architecture possessing characteristics necessary for organisms to evolve into more complex forms. This architecture supports modularity by…
A theoretical study of cell evolution is presented here. By using a toolbox containing an intracellular catalytic reaction network model and a mutation-selection process, four distinct phases of self-organization were unveiled. First, the…