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Natural Selection, Hypercycles and the Origin of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2023

Sahotra Sarkar
Sahotra Sarkar*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Over the last eighteen years Manfred Eigen and his co-workers have postulated a new theory about the origin of life on earth that has presented a detailed account of how many of the features of extant living organisms (such as a universal genetic code and protein-nucleic acid interdependence) might have arisen from purely physical interactions.2 This theory is critically based on the special dynamical properties of certain chemical cycles called “hypercycles” which cause some of them to exhibit hyperbolic growth over time while undergoing selection. The purpose of this paper is to separate two aspects of this theory and then to study the first one in greater detail. The first aspect consists of a physical account of evolution by natural selection at the molecular level that depends only on the kinetics of certain chemical systems and can be applied to a variety of such systems. The second consists of the special dynamical properties that are exhibited when this account is applied, specifically, to hypercycles.

Type
Part VII. Biology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1988 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1988 , 1988 , pp. 196 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1988

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Footnotes

1

Thanks are due to William C. Wimsatt for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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