相关论文: A formal model of autocatalytic sets emerging in a…

The evolution of autocatalytic sets (ACS) is a widespread process in biological, chemical and ecological systems which is of great significance in many applications, such as the evolution of new species or complex chemical organizations. In…

There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a…

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…

An explanatory model for the emergence of evolvable units must display emerging structures that (1) preserve themselves in time (2) self-reproduce and (3) tolerate a certain amount of variation when reproducing. To tackle this challenge,…

We construct a simple model of a proto-cell that simulates a stochastic dynamics of abstract chemicals on a two-dimensional lattice. We assume that chemicals catalyze their reproduction through interaction with each other, and that between…

Autocatalysis is a fundamental concept, used in a wide range of domains. From the most general definition of autocatalysis, that is a process in which a chemical compound is able to catalyze its own formation, several different systems can…

A modeling formalism is proposed for the description and study of living and life-like systems. It provides an abstract conceptual model framework for real life and evolution of biological organisms. It is proposed, that this model…

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…

Autocatalysis, the ability of a chemical system to make more of itself, is a crucial feature in metabolism and is speculated to have played a decisive role in the origin of life. Nevertheless, how autocatalytic systems behave far from…

Self-sustaining autocatalytic chemical networks represent a necessary, though not sufficient condition for the emergence of early living systems. These networks have been formalised and investigated within the framework of RAF theory, which…

Formalizing self reproduction in dynamical hierarchies is one of the important problems in Artificial Life (AL) studies. We study, in this paper, an inductively defined algebraic framework for self reproduction on macroscopic organizational…

It has been proposed that cultural evolution was made possible by a cognitive transition brought about by onset of the capacity for self-triggered recall and rehearsal. Here we develop a novel idea that models of collectively autocatalytic…

A key step in the origin of life is the emergence of a primitive metabolism. This requires the formation of a subset of chemical reactions that is both self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic. A generic theory to study such processes…

Even the simplest organisms are too complex to have spontaneously arisen fully-formed, yet precursors to first life must have emerged ab initio from their environment. A watershed event was the appearance of the first entity capable of…

It has been pointed out that if an autocatalytic cycle produces primitive membrane chemicals, it can compose a self-maintaining proto cell. Moreover, it is known that a proto cell can divide itself spontaneously as it grows. An unsolved…

We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypotheses have known difficulties: All known evolvable molecular…

A self-replicator is usually understood to be an object of definite form that promotes the conversion of materials in its environment into a nearly identical copy of itself. The challenge of engineering novel, micro- or nano-scale…

Spontaneous self-replication in cellular automata has long been considered rare, with most known examples requiring careful design or artificial initialization. In this paper, we present formal, causal evidence that such replication can…

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"…

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,…