Related papers: The origin and early evolution of life in chemical…
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 propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first"…
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…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
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…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
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 is commonly described as a self-organized, far-from-equilibrium process that maintains internal order by consuming free energy and exporting entropy. This thermodynamic view underlies diverse theoretical frameworks -- from autopoiesis…
Through in-depth thinking and reasoning about the conditions required for cells to maintain unchanged material distribution, it is concluded that life metabolic reactions require high information content. However, the self-replication of a…
This paper attempts to make feasible the evolutionary emergence of novelty in a supposedly deterministic world which behavior is associated with those of the mathematical dynamical systems. The work was motivated by the observation of…
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…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
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…
The universal concept of complexity by the dynamic redundance paradigm and the ensuing concept of extended dynamic fractality (physics/9806002) are applied here to higher levels of complexity corresponding to living systems. After recalling…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
The concept of evolutionary development of structures constituted a \emph{real} revolution in biology: it was possible to understand how the very complex structures of life can arise in an out-of-equilibrium system. The investigation of…