Abstract
A fundamental issue of evolution of life is the emergence and maintenance of self-referential autocatalytic systems (e.g. living cells). In this paper the problem is analyzed from a computational perspective. It is proposed that such systems have to be infinite autocatalytic systems, which can be considered equivalent to Turing machines. The implication of this is that searching for finite autocatalytic systems is likely to not be successful, and any such finite system would be maintainable only in a highly stable environment. The infiniteness of autocatalytic systems also implies that top-down search for the simplest living system is likely to stop at relatively complex cells that are still able to provide a realization of infinite autocatalytic systems.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Miller, J.G.: Living Systems. McGraw-Hill, New York (1978)
Lovelock, J.: Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press, New York (1987)
Kauffmann, S.: The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford University Press, New York (1993)
Joyce, G.F.: Booting up life. Nature 420, 278–279 (2002)
Miller, S.L., Orgel, L.E.: The Origins of Life on the Earth. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1974)
Segre, D., Lancet, D.: Composing life. EMBO Reports 1, 217–222 (2000)
Maturana, H.R., Varela, F.J.: Autopoiesis and Cognition. In: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht (1980)
Rosen, R.: Life Itself. Columbia University Press (1991)
Ganti, T.: The Principles of Life. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2003)
Glansdorff, N., Xu, Y., Labedan, B.: The Last Universal Common Ancestor: emergence, constitution and genetic legacy of an elusive forerunner. Biology Direct 3, 29 (2008)
Lartigue, C., Glass, J.I., Alperovich, N., Pieper, R., Pramar, P.P., Hutchinson, C.A., Smith, H.O., Venter, J.C.: Genome transplantation in bacteria: changing one species to another. Science 317, 632–638 (2007)
Lincoln, T.A., Joyce, G.F.: Self-sustained replication of an RNA enzyme. Science 323, 1229–1232 (2009)
Rashevsky, N.: Outline of a unified approach to physics, biology and sociology. Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 31, 159–198 (1969)
Wolfram, S.: A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Champaign (2002)
Paun, G., Rozenberg, G., Salomaa, A.: DNA Computing. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Pierce, B.J.: Basic Category Theory for Computer Scientists. MIT Press, Cambridge (1991)
Mac Lane, S.: Categories for the Working Mathematician. Springer, New York (1998)
Crole, R.L.: Categories for Types. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1993)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Andras, P. (2011). Modeling Living Systems. In: Kampis, G., Karsai, I., Szathmáry, E. (eds) Advances in Artificial Life. Darwin Meets von Neumann. ECAL 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5778. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21314-4_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21314-4_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21313-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21314-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)