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POLYMER ASSEMBLY. "When life on Earth began nearly 4 billion years ago, long before humans, dinosaurs or even the earliest single-celled forms of life roamed, it may have started as a hiccup rather than a roar: small, simple molecular building blocks known as "monomers" coming together into longer "polymer" chains and falling apart in the warm pools of primordial ooze over and over again." https://lnkd.in/d8gcKMj View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR PARASITES OF REPLICATORS. "It is likely that such replicators would have been plagued by molecular parasites, which would have been passively replicated by the RNA world machinery without contributing to it." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

"COMPLEXITY cannot solely determine behavior. A pertinent example of this is the formose reaction, whereby the incubation of the two simple precursors formaldehyde and glycoaldehyde can lead to the spontaneous synthesis of many sugars, including ribose." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

FITNESS AND SURVIVAL. "Molecular variants capable of faster replication would come to dominate a population, and the development of cycles in which templates could foster one another’s replication would have led to increasingly complex replicators and from thence to the initial genomes." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

PHYSICAL COMPLEXITY. "Complexity is not unique to living systems and can be seen in many non-living physical systems as well as in simple mathematical models." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

SELF-REPLICATION. "For nucleic acids, the story likely begins with simple chemical replication, perhaps of the form A + B → T, in which T serves as a template for the joining of A and B." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

BEHAVIORAL CHEMISTRY. "When the molecules involved are complex enough to attain a stochastic element to their structural conformation in such a way as to radically affect their function in a biological (evolvable) setting, then they have the capacity to behave, and the analysis of such molecular-level behavior would be described as behavioral chemistry. Behavioral chemistry is derived from two processes, either or both of which can be in operation at any given point in time." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

MUTATION. "The ability to mutate in a discrete or quantized way, without frequent reversion, may be an additional requirement for Darwinian evolution." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

STANDARD ASSUMPTIONS. "When scientists think about the replication of information in chemistry, they usually have in mind something akin to what happens in living organisms when DNA gets copied." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION OF INFORMATION. "The key to the origins of life is the replication of information. Linear polymers such as nucleic acids that both carry information and can be replicated are currently what we consider to be the basis of living systems." https://lnkd.in/drTPyYN View in LinkedIn