Principal Investigator Jeremy L England
Project Website http://www.englandlab.com/self-replication.html
Not all things made of molecules undergo what we would call evolution or natural selection, yet all living, evolving things are made of molecules that obey simple, physical, mechanical laws. What sort of physics gives rise to self-replicating forms capable of evolution? Click here to find out how we've begun to study this question.
When we talk about evolution, we tend to take two things for granted: first, that our subject of study will be some sort of self-replicating phenomenon capable of reproducing itself with imperfect fidelity, and second, that the frequency of this replicator's successful self-replication and the likelihood of its survival will be somehow modulated by the way it interacts with its environment.
The tricky thing here is the question of which precise properties of the environment affect the replicator's proliferation, and how precisely they do so. When talking about real organisms, in all their complexity, it is inevitably necessary to make some kind of approximation in the course of developing a model.
This raises the question of how matters might differ if we instead considered a system in which it were possible to treat replicator and environment each on equal footing, as parts of the same physical system. In other words, what can we learn if we consider the physical dynamics of a mixture of atoms exhibiting a "toy chemistry" that allows them to combine into varied forms, possessing well-defined energies of interaction with each other?
Our goal is to develop analytical and computational models of how self-replicating forms emerge and compete for sources of chemical free energy under conducive physical conditions. Such an approach opens the door to an understanding of the onset of evolutionary dynamics expressed in the terms of physics.