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GROWTH OF POPULATIONS. "Originally autocatalytic sets of polymers were introduced to explain how self-organization could provide a complex system upon which natural selection could act." https://lnkd.in/euzMX5X View in LinkedIn

MITOCHONDRIA have a very anomalous reproductive life, breaking the rules of Mendel. In large part because they are semi-autonomous, having been derived from an engulfed bacteria many millions of years ago, and today exist in a highly streamlined form with most of their genes having been transferred to the host nucleus. View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION BEFORE GENES. "Our current understanding of evolution is so tightly linked to template-dependent replication of DNA and RNA molecules that the old idea from Oparin of a self-reproducing 'garbage bag' ('coacervate') of chemicals that predated fully-fledged cell-like entities seems to be farfetched to most scientists today." https://lnkd.in/euzMX5X View in LinkedIn

REPRODUCTION IN NATURE is not limited to organisms, nor to cells, but also the very organelles within cells, such as the mitochondrion, chloroplast and nucleus, all of which originated in an ancient foreign engulfment. Their reproduction is rather independent from the rest of the organism's cells. View in LinkedIn

DURABLE AUTOCATALYSIS. "A unifying theme in both camps has been self-sustained autocatalysis: Nature's ability to generate copies of a given entity leading to multiplication. It boosted the concentration of required molecules in Darwin's 'warm little pond' (or any relevant environment for chemical evolution), and allowed the increase of replicating (reproducing) units in a geometrical progression that makes the 'survival of the fittest' possible." https://lnkd.in/euzMX5X View in LinkedIn

GENETICS-FIRST CAMP "find implausible the idea that molecular networks without genetic control could have undergone Darwinian evolution." https://lnkd.in/euzMX5X View in LinkedIn

METABOLISM-FIRST CAMP. "There are two camps in the origin of life. The metabolism-first camp advocates consider improbable that RNA-like self-replicating polymers appeared before natural selection had operated on chemical networks." https://lnkd.in/euzMX5X View in LinkedIn

DEATH OR REPLICATION. "Natural selection is a mechanism by which populations adapt and evolve. In its essence, it is a simple statement about rates of reproduction and mortality: Those individual organisms who happen to be best suited to an environment survive and reproduce most successfully, producing many similarly well-adapted descendants." Impressive. https://lnkd.in/eaizZgz View in LinkedIn

SELECTIVE PROCESS. "Natural selection is the gradual, non-random process by which genetically inherited traits (alleles) become either more or less common in a population due to non-random differences in the effective reproductive rate of bearers of these genetic traits." https://lnkd.in/eS_4y_J View in LinkedIn

PREFERENTIAL SURVIVAL. "Natural selection is the differential reproduction of genotypes. ‘Natural selection […] is the differential and non-random reproduction of different alternative alleles in a population’...population genetics and modern evolutionary theory equate natural selection with differential reproduction of alternative forms of genes, genotypes, or other reproducible units’." Lovely definition. https://lnkd.in/eS_4y_J View in LinkedIn