Abstract
The transition from chemistry to biology is an extremely complex issue because of the huge phenomenological differences between the two domains and because this transition has many different aspects and dimensions. In this paper, I will try to analyze how chemical systems have developed a cohesive, self-maintaining and functionally differentiated system that recruits its organization to stay far from equilibrium. This organization cannot exist but in an individualized form, and yet, it unfolds both a diachronic-historical and a synchronic collective dimension. I will argue that, far from being a problem, these different dimensions of the phenomenon of life, appear as a consequence of the nature of this individualized organization.
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Notes
I will not discuss here the problem of whether life could or should be defined for developing a useful research program in the Origin of Life domain. First, because in this paper I will only try to explain the emergence of certain (in my view, fundamental) properties of life as we know it in our planet; and second, because I am just focusing only in the earlier steps of the biogenic process, and therefore, I am not endorsing here any claim about which could be the requirements to call something a full-fledged biological system.
This combinatorial process is in turn enhanced by the phenomenon of catalysis (a catalyst is a chemical element that increases the rate of a reaction without being consumed).
A side reaction is a secondary or subsidiary reaction that takes place simultaneously with the reaction of primary interest.
And of course, they should also be able to preserve organizational innovations. But we will discuss this question later.
Though a reflexively catalytic network has not yet been produced in vitro, different theoretical studies suggest that it is likely that systems achieving reflexive catalytic closure could have appeared before a RNA stage (Hordjik et al. 2012; Vasas et al. 2012). These models are based on the pioneer work of Kauffman (1986).
De Duve (2007) uses the term “proto-metabolism” for those chemical networks driven by catalysts that, whatever their nature, cannot have displayed the exquisite specificity of present-day enzymes and must necessarily have produced some sort of “dirty gemisch”.
The origin of far-from-equilibrium maintenance of chemical organizations also raises the problem of the interplay of individuated systems and collective networks, or in other words, of sets of different types of individual systems in conjunction with environmental compounds, interacting together as a long-term self-maintaining collective system. This is an important issue in the field of Origin of Life because the early appearance of a collective proto-ecological network would in turn permit metabolically less complex individual systems. As discussed by Morowitz (1992) and Morange (2008), metabolic simplicity depends on the chemical demands of the environment and, as a consequence, there is not a minimal metabolic network. Thus, a highly stable and chemically rich environment is less demanding than a more changeable and chemically restricted one. However, the trade-off between metabolic and environmental complexities during the early evolutionary stages has yet to be explored. I will discuss later (Sect. 6) the close and complex relationship between the individual and collective dimensions in the origin of life.
A protocell is any experimental or theoretical model that involves a self-assembling compartment linked to chemical processes taking place around or within it (Rasmussen et al. 2008; Ruiz-Mirazo 2011). Here, I use the concept of protocell in a slightly more specific sense, as a far-from-equilibrium, self-maintaining compartmentalized system with some prebiotic properties, such as growth, autocatalytic activities or reproduction.
In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Wilson and Barker (2016) define organism as a contiguous living system, capable of some degree of response to stimuli (“agency”), reproduction, growth and development, and homeostasis.
Template replication is a typical example. In fact, the basic mechanism of replication by template can be found in relatively simple systems, like the growth of crystals. Modular templates like RNA or DNA are a specific form of this mechanism. The process of copy by template is grounded in the morphological and chemical properties (i.e. a conjunction of form and materiality) possessed by certain polymers, especially nucleic acids. In these molecules, nucleotides polymerize one by one, following the guidelines set by the template string; no instructions are required to explicitly determine the form of the final set, because the reconstruction of the sequential configuration of the original molecule is ensured by the complementarity principle of nucleotide bases.
Evelyn Fox Keller (2009, 2010) has suggested that some form of historical accumulation of complexity preceded evolution by natural selection. What Keller is trying to stress is that what is needed for a primitive form of evolution is the existence of systems with properties that contribute to their persistence, which will be enough to trigger a different (simpler) selection process for stability and persistence. In other words, adaptation mechanisms, which result in the generation of stabilities in a system, are enough for the operation of simpler evolutionary-competitive dynamics that will result in different degrees of maintenance of those stabilities.
As argued in Moreno and Ruiz-Mirazo (2009), there are several experimental cases (e.g. Walde et al. 1994; Segre and Lancet 2000; Chen et al. 2004) which have shown that multiplication, variation and heredity would constitute a necessary but not sufficient set of conditions for what is commonly understood as evolution by natural selection.
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Moreno, A. Some conceptual issues in the transition from chemistry to biology. HPLS 38, 16 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-016-0117-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-016-0117-y