Dynamic Self-organization in an Open Reaction Network as a Fundamental Mechanism for the Emergence of Life

10 February 2021, Version 2
This content is a preprint and has not undergone peer review at the time of posting.

Abstract

The emergence of life on the earth has attracted intense attention but the mechanism of it still remains an unsolved question. A key problem is that it has been left unclear why a living organism, which is regarded as an open reaction system, can demonstrate dynamic self-organization leading to highly-ordered structures and adaptive and evolutionary behavior. This paper shows by computer simulation that an open reaction network, which is characterized as a network of flexible constituent elements and irreversible processes, is converted to a self-organized system with adaptive and evolutionary ability when it has reached a fully-balanced stationary state. Strikingly, this result indicates that dynamic self-organization spontaneously emerges in a prebiotic chemical system placed under constant thermodynamic forces according to the second law of thermodynamics, not against it. The dynamic self-organization has potential for producing highly ordered chemical structures through evolution and is expected to have played a fundamental role in the emergence of life on the primitive earth.

Keywords

self-organization mechanisms
reaction network
evolution

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