title: The transition from constraint to regulation at the origin of life.
abstract: The origin of living dynamics required a local evasion of thermodynamic degradation by maintaining critical dynamical and structural constraints. Scenarios for life`s origin that fail to distinguish between constrained chemistry and regulated metabolism do not address the question of how living processes first emerge from simpler constraints on molecular interactions. We describe a molecular model system consisting of coupled reciprocal catalysis and self-assembly in which one of the catalytic bi-products tends to spontaneously self-assemble into a containing shell (analogous to a viral capsule). In this process, which we call autogenesis, self-repair/reconstitution and reproduction are made possible by the fact that each of these linked self-organizing processes generates boundary constraints that promote and limit the other, and because this synergy thereby becomes embodied as a persistent rate-independent substrate-transferrable constraint on the synergy of its component constraint-generating processes. It is proposed that this higher-order formal constraint is necessary and sufficient to constitute regulation as opposed to mere physico-chemical constraint. Two minor elaborations of this model system demonstrate how cybernetic and template-based regulation could emerge from this basic process.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
authors.forename: Terrence W
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Deacon
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
authors.forename: Alok
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Srivastava
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.
authors.forename: J Augustus
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Bacigalupi
mesh_terms: D001704:Biopolymers / Q000737:chemistry*; D002384:Catalysis; D008954:Models, Biological; D008956:Models, Chemical; D000069497:Origin of Life; D058105:Polymerization; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D001704:Biopolymers