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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 replicators such as RNA require complex chemical (enzymatic) machinery for the replication process. Likewise, contemporary cellular metabolisms require several enzymatically catalyzed steps, and it is difficult to identify a non-enzymatic path to their realization. We propose that there must have been precursors to both replication and metabolism that enable a form of selection to take place through action of simple chemical and physical processes. We model a concrete example of such a process, repeated sequestration of binary molecular combinations after exposure to an environment with a broad distribution of chemical components, as might be realized experimentally in in a repeated wet-dry cycle. We show that the repeated sequestration dynamics results in a selective amplification of a very small subset of molecular species present in the environment, thus providing a candidate primordial selection process.
The Wright-Fisher process with selection is an important tool in population genetics theory. Traditional analysis of this process relies on the diffusion approximation. The diffusion approximation is usually studied in a partial differential equation
We follow up on a companion work that considered growth rates of populations growing at different sites, with different randomly varying growth rates at each site, in the limit as migration between sites goes to 0. We extend this work here to the spe
We study a continuous-time dynamical system that models the evolving distribution of genotypes in an infinite population where genomes may have infinitely many or even a continuum of loci, mutations accumulate along lineages without back-mutation, ad
Understanding the patterns and processes of diversification of life in the planet is a key challenge of science. The Tree of Life represents such diversification processes through the evolutionary relationships among the different taxa, and can be ex
The probability distribution of sequences with maximum entropy that satisfies a given amino acid composition at each site and a given pairwise amino acid frequency at each site pair is a Boltzmann distribution with $exp(-psi_N)$, where the total inte