title: On the evolution of homochirality.
abstract: This work reconsiders recent ideas on the origin of biological homochirality by formally invoking the standard groupoid approach to stereochemistry in a thermodynamic context that generalizes Landau's spontaneous symmetry breaking arguments. On Earth, limited metabolic free energy density may have served as a low temperature-analog to 'freeze' the system in the lowest energy state, i.e., the set of simplest homochiral transitive groupoids representing reproductive chemistries. These engaged in Darwinian competition until a single configuration survived. Subsequent path-dependent evolutionary process locked-in this initial condition. Astrobiological outcomes, in the presence of higher initial metabolic free energy densities, could well be considerably richer, for example, of mixed chirality. One result would be a complicated distribution of biological chirality across a statistically large sample of extraterrestrial stereochemistry, in marked contrast with recent published analyses predicting a racemic average.
authors.affiliation: Division of Epidemiology, The New York State Psychiatric Institute, NY 10032, USA. rodrick.wallace@gmail.com
authors.forename: Rodrick
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wallace
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005075:Biological Evolution; D004734:Energy Metabolism; D019418:Evolution, Chemical; D018559:Exobiology; D008954:Models, Biological; D008968:Molecular Conformation; D000069497:Origin of Life; D013237:Stereoisomerism; D013816:Thermodynamics