ReviewPhilosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences2017
Conceptualizing the origin of life in terms of evolution.
Review in Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Compositional memory matters for early molecular systems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- From experimental clues to theoretical modeling: Evolution associated with the membrane-takeover at an early stage of life.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Structural Enzymology, Phylogenetics, Differentiation, and Symbolic Reflexivity at the Dawn of Biology.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Selectively advantageous instability in biotic and pre-biotic systems and implications for evolution and aging.Frontiers in aging · 2024Review
- Artificial cell design: reconstructing biology for life science applications.Emerging topics in life sciences · 2022Review
- How evolution builds up complexity?: In vitro evolution approaches to witness complexification in artificial molecular replication systems.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2022Article
- The automatic parameter-exploration with a machine-learning-like approach: Powering the evolutionary modeling on the origin of life.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Article
- Applications of phage-derived RNA-based technologies in synthetic biology.Synthetic and systems biotechnology · 2020Review
- Thresholds in Origin of Life Scenarios.iScience · 2020Review
- Roadmap to Building a Cell: An Evolutionary Approach.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2020Article
- Re-conceptualizing the origins of life.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In this opinion piece, we discuss how to place evolution in the context of origin-of-life research. Our discussion starts with a popular definition: 'life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution'. According to this definition, the origin of life is the same as the origin of evolution: evolution is the 'end' of the origin of life. This perspective, however, has a limitation, in that the ability of evolution in and of itself is insufficient to explain the origin of life as we know it, as indicated by Spiegelman's and Lincoln and Joyce's experiments. This limitation provokes a crucial question: What conditions are required for replicating systems to evolve into life? From this perspective, the origin of life includes the emergence of life through evolution: evolution is a 'means' of the origin of life. After reviewing Eigen's pioneering work on this question, we mention our ongoing work suggesting that a key condition might be conflicting multi-level evolution. Taken together, there are thus two questions regarding the origin of life: how evolution gets started, and how evolution produces life. Evolution is, therefore, at the centre of the origin of life, where the two lines of enquiry must meet.This article is part of the themed issue 'Reconceptualizing the origins of life'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.