From Physics to Biology: Emergence of Evolution by Natural Selection?
| When |
Jan 14, 2025
from 11:00 to 12:00 |
|---|---|
| Where | Amphi H |
| Attendees |
Thomas Kosc |
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It is increasingly recognized that producing a consistent explanation for the origination of life will require us to explain how Darwinian evolution may have gradually emerged from a physical world. Gradually rather than suddenly, that is, without assuming that natural selection only came into play once chance alone had produced the first obvious “replicators”. Under this perspective of a smooth transition from physics to biology, natural selection is hypothesized to be acting already in the prebiotic world as a driver to complexity, but in a rudimentary and currently unrecognizable fashion.
To explore this path, we model a “primordial soup” using out-of-equilibrium reaction networks, and expose that they already display at a very low level (i.e. close to physics) peculiar reaction patterns, autocatalytic cycles, for which we present some results. Autocatalysis is often viewed as a key player in the origination of life for its supposed link to the formation of the first metabolisms. In addition, it may facilitate the emergence of multistability, that is, the existence of several stationary stable states, and we shall explain why we see this phenomenon as a physical analogue of mutation of a biology in the making. Finally, by adding the component of a heterogeneous space, we present the idea that the behavior of a reaction network could bring in the formalism of cellular automata, which offers the stimulating perspective of a bottom-up bridging between our work and the community of artificial life.