相关论文: The Emergence of Life as a First Order Phase Trans…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
The origin of life occupies a very important place in the study of the evolution. Its liminal location between life and non-life poses special challenges to researchers who study this subject. Current approaches in studying the origin and…
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"…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
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…
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 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…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
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…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
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…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
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…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
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…