Hisashi Ohtsuki of the Japan Science and Technology Agency and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, along with Martin Nowak of Harvard University, have investigated how
evolution might have first begun.
The published article describes a purely chemical system, a model made up of two types of monomers (0 and 1), that randomly link together to form a polymer chain and infinitely many lineages (a tree), which could have served as PRE-LIFE. “Prelife refers to chemical reactions in a soup of chemicals that consists of amino acids, phosphoric acids, nucleobases, and so on,” Ohtsuki explained.
The perfect prelife
catalyst (comes on/off) is a string that enhances the rates of all chemical reactions in its own lineage, thus becoming more efficient and capable of selection and mutation. The faster the rate of reactions to create a certain prelife, the more of them there will be. As such it builds the sequences needed for
replication (stays on), finally resulting in life.
Replication is a concept which is often omitted while discussing evolution, but is critical for life to occur. Assuming fast template-based elongation reactions, they show that replicators have selection thresholds that are independent of their sequence length. Their calculation demonstrates the efficiency of replication and provides an explanation of why replication was selected over other forms of prelife catalysis.
How Did Evolution Begin?
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