TY - JOUR
T1 - Prebiotic geochemical automata at the intersection of radiolytic chemistry, physical complexity, and systems biology
AU - Adam, Zachary R.
AU - Fahrenbach, Albert C.
AU - Kacar, Betul
AU - Aono, Masashi
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (494291, Zachary R. Adam). This work was supported by John Templeton Foundation Grant no. 58562 (Betul Kacar) and National Science Foundation Grant EF-1724090 (Betul Kacar). T he authors would like to thank Marta Dueñas Diez and Juan Perez-Mercader for stimulating discussions that led to this paper. This article is the product of a workshop titled “Proto-computation and Proto-life,” held at Harvard University on December 10-11, 2016.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Zachary R. Adam et al.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - The tractable history of life records a successive emergence of organisms composed of hierarchically organized cells and greater degrees of individuation. The lowermost object level of this hierarchy is the cell, but it is unclear whether the organizational attributes of living systems extended backward through prebiotic stages of chemical evolution. If the systems biology attributes of the cell were indeed templated upon prebiotic synthetic relationships between subcellular objects, it is not obvious how to categorize object levels below the cell in ways that capture any hierarchies which may have preceded living systems. In this paper, we map out stratified relationships between physical components that drive the production of key prebiotic molecules starting from radiolysis of a small number of abundant molecular species. Connectivity across multiple levels imparts the potential to create and maintain far-from-equilibrium chemical conditions and to manifest nonlinear system behaviors best approximated using automata formalisms. The architectural attribute of "information hiding" of energy exchange processes at each object level is shared with stable, multitiered automata such as digital computers. These attributes may indicate a profound connection between the system complexity afforded by energy dissipation by subatomic level objects and the emergence of complex automata that could have preceded biological systems.
AB - The tractable history of life records a successive emergence of organisms composed of hierarchically organized cells and greater degrees of individuation. The lowermost object level of this hierarchy is the cell, but it is unclear whether the organizational attributes of living systems extended backward through prebiotic stages of chemical evolution. If the systems biology attributes of the cell were indeed templated upon prebiotic synthetic relationships between subcellular objects, it is not obvious how to categorize object levels below the cell in ways that capture any hierarchies which may have preceded living systems. In this paper, we map out stratified relationships between physical components that drive the production of key prebiotic molecules starting from radiolysis of a small number of abundant molecular species. Connectivity across multiple levels imparts the potential to create and maintain far-from-equilibrium chemical conditions and to manifest nonlinear system behaviors best approximated using automata formalisms. The architectural attribute of "information hiding" of energy exchange processes at each object level is shared with stable, multitiered automata such as digital computers. These attributes may indicate a profound connection between the system complexity afforded by energy dissipation by subatomic level objects and the emergence of complex automata that could have preceded biological systems.
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U2 - 10.1155/2018/9376183
DO - 10.1155/2018/9376183
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85049865968
VL - 2018
JO - Complexity
JF - Complexity
SN - 1076-2787
M1 - 9376183
ER -