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INFORMATION THEORY. “We have presented a framework for understanding the origin of life as a transition in causal structure, and information management and control, whereby information gains causal efficacy over the matter it is instantiated in.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION FLOW. “We have argued that living and non-living matter differ fundamentally in the way information is organized and flows through the system: biological systems are distinctive because information manipulates the matter it is instantiated in. This leads to a very different, context-dependent, causal narrative—with causal influences running both up and down the hierarchy of structure of biological systems (i.e. from state to dynamical rules and dynamical rules to the state).” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

HALLMARK OF LIFE. “The division of labour implicit in bimolecular life bestows one very obvious and distinctive advantage; it enables the instructions to be physically separated and stored away from the hardware that implements them. The ‘arm's length’ control implicit in this division is exercised via a software channel—encoded transactions using messengers and specialized bilingual agents that identify, and are read by a system that can decode the instructions. Thus, the algorithm inhabits one molecular universe and its products inhabit another. We consider this separation to be one of the hallmarks of life.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

NON-TRIVIAL REPLICATORS. “Although modern life is clearly representative of the class of non-trivial self-replicators, the majority of work on the origin of life has focused on the conceptually simpler case of trivial self-replication. This is not without good reason: the origin of translation—mediating what is known of the transition from trivial to non-trivial—is notoriously difficult to pin down, amounting to an algorithmic takeover of information stored in one molecular species (nucleic acids) that becomes operable over another structurally and chemically very different species (peptides).” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

"NICHE DIVERGENCE may lead to less competition with progenitors or to a competitive advantage, and correlatively higher levels of population growth, which is essential if new populations are to survive in the face of demographic and environmental stochasticity." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

TRIVIAL REPLICATORS. “A vast logical divide exists between trivial and non-trivial replicators because the former is not explicitly programmed. Instead, trivial replicators rely strictly on the implicit physics (and chemistry) of the current environment to support replication. Therefore, only a limited set of objects within a given universality class is constructible. In other words, trivial self-replicating systems can only access one instructional mode, the one which the system is currently operating in, and as such are capable of only passive information handling.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

FRESH GENES. "Greater niche differentiation between progenitor and neopolyploid increases the proximity and opportunity to mate with other neopolyploids, a key factor in polyploid establishment." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

TRIVIAL VERSUS NON-TRIVIAL REPLICATORS. “Although von Neumann automata are self-replicators, their mode of replication is non-trivial in a fundamental, logical sense, and should be distinguished from trivial replicators such as crystals, viruses, computer viruses, non-enzymatic template replicators, lipid composomes and Penrose blocks.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn

A BETTER LIFE. "An evolutionary advantage may accrue to allopolyploids from higher rates of population establishment and persistence. This may occur because genome doubling, especially when two divergent genomes are present, provides an immediate vehicle for transcending parental niches." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. “An explanation of life's origin is fundamentally incomplete in the absence of an account of how the unique causal role played by information in living systems first emerged. In other words, we need to explain the origin of both the hardware and software aspects of life, or the job is only half finished.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn