Related papers: Onset of natural selection in auto-catalytic heter…
Self-replicating systems based on information-coding polymers are of crucial importance in biology. They also recently emerged as a paradigm in material design on nano- and micro-scales. We present a general theoretical and numerical…
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…
A mystery about the origins of life is which molecular structures $-$ and what spontaneous processes $-$ drove the autocatalytic transition from simple chemistry to biology? Using the HP lattice model of polymer sequence spaces leads to the…
The emergence of longer information-carrying and functional nucleotide polymers from random short strands was a major stepping stone at the dawn of life. But the formation of those polymers under temperature oscillation required some form…
We present a theoretical as well as experimental investigation of a population of self-replicating segments of code subject to random mutation and survival of the fittest. Under the assumption that such a system constitutes a minimal system…
The apparent difficulty of designing simple autocatalysts that grow exponentially in the absence of enzymes, external drives or ingenious internal mechanisms severely constrains scenarios for the emergence of evolution by natural selection…
An autocatalytic pattern matching polymer system is studied as an abstract model for chemical ecosystem evolution. Highly ordered populations with particular sequence patterns appear spontaneously out of a vast number of possible states.…
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…
A central challenge in the origin of life is understanding how catalytic peptide-like polymers and information-bearing nucleic acid-like polymers emerged as an interde-pendent system. This study constructs a primordial cognitive model…
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…
We develop a formal model of the emergence of self-constructing objects (e.g. heteropolymers with autocatalytic capability) in an open system, which don't contain such objects initially. The objects are constructed from subunits (e.g.…
Emergence and maintenance of polymers with complex sequences is a major question in the study of origins of life. To answer this, we studied a model polymerization reaction, where polymers are synthesized by stepwise ligation from two types…
We study the ability to maintain information in a population of reacting polymers under the influence of decay, i.e., spontaneous breakdown of large polymers. At a certain decay rate, it becomes impossible to maintain a significant…
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…
Natural supports of information are given by random copolymers such as DNA or RNA where information is coded in the sequence of covalent bonds. At the molecular scale, the stochastic growth of a single copolymer with or without a template…
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…
Many models for the origin of life have focused on understanding how evolution can drive the refinement of a preexisting enzyme, such as the evolution of efficient replicase activity. Here we present a model for what was, arguably, an even…
Each living species carries a complex DNA sequence that determines their unique features and functionalities. It is generally assumed that life started from a random pool of oligonucleotides sequences, generated by a prebiotic…
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…
The continuity of life and its evolution, we proposed, emerge from an interactive group process manifested in networks of interaction. We term this process \textit{survival-of-the-fitted}. Here, we reason that survival of the fitted results…