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We show that textual analysis of microbial genomes reveal telling footprints of the early evolution of the genomes. The frequencies of word occurrence of random DNA sequences considered as texts in their four nucleotides are expected to…
It has been suggested that major transitions in evolution require the emergence of novelties, often associated to the cooperative behaviour of previously existing objects or agents. A key innovation involves the first cooperative…
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…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
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…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
Generative models emerge as promising candidates for novel sequence-data driven approaches to protein design, and for the extraction of structural and functional information about proteins deeply hidden in rapidly growing sequence…
In the study of life's origins, a key challenge is understanding how RNA could have polymerized and subsequently replicated in early Earth. We present a theoretical and computational framework to model the non-enzymatic polymerization of…
Molecular biology explains function of molecules by their geometrical and electronical structures that are mainly determined by utilization of quantum effects in chemistry. However, further quantum effects are not thought to play any…
The problem of evolutionary complexification of life is considered one of the fundamental aspects in contemporary evolutionary theory. Parasitism is ubiquitous, inevitable, and arises as soon as the first replicators appear, even during the…
Hopfield models, originally developed to study memory retrieval in neural networks, have become versatile tools for modeling diverse biological systems in which function emerges from collective dynamics. In this review, we provide a…
It is suggested that life originated in a three-step process referred to as the jigsaw model. RNA, proteins, or similar organic molecules polymerized in a dehydrated carbon-rich environment, on surfaces in a carbon-rich environment, or in…
We study a family of networks of autocatalytic reactions, which we call hyperchains, that are a generalization of hypercycles. Hyperchains, and the associated dynamical system called replicator equations, are a possible mechanism for…
Evolution produces complex and structured networks of interacting components in chemical, biological, and social systems. We describe a simple mathematical model for the evolution of an idealized chemical system to study how a network of…
This paper reports on patterns exhibiting self-replication with spontaneous, inheritable mutations and exponential genetic drift in Neural Cellular Automata. Despite the models not being explicitly trained for mutation or inheritability,…
The aims of this paper are to propose, construct and analyse microscopic kinetic models for the emergence of long chains of RNA from monomeric beta-D-ribonucleotide precursors in prebiotic circumstances. Our theory starts out from similar…
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…
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…