ReviewNature reviews. Chemistry2020
On the conditions for mimicking natural selection in chemical systems.
Review in Nature reviews. Chemistry, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Chemical Routes to Primitive Membranes: Prebiotic Lipid Formation at the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Autocatalytic cores in the diluted regime: classification and properties.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Thermodynamics of Darwinian selection in molecular replicators.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Evolution at the Origins of Life?Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Did organs precede organisms in the origin of life?microLife · 2024Article
- Selectively advantageous instability in biotic and pre-biotic systems and implications for evolution and aging.Frontiers in aging · 2024Review
- On the Emergence of Autonomous Chemical Systems through Dissipation Kinetics.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Selection between Competing Self-Reproducing Lipids: Succession and Dynamic Activation.JACS Au · 2021Article
- A physicochemical orthophosphate cycle via a kinetically stable thermodynamically activated intermediate enables mild prebiotic phosphorylations.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Self-Reproduction and Darwinian Evolution in Autocatalytic Chemical Reaction Systems.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Functional Constitutional Dynamic Networks Revealing Evolutionary Reproduction/Variation/Selection Principles.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2020Article
- Enzyme-Guided Selection and Cascaded Emergence of Nanostructured Constitutional Dynamic Networks.Nano letters · 2020Article
- Chemical Mechanisms of Prebiotic Chirality Amplification.Research (Washington, D.C.) · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The emergence of natural selection, requiring that reproducing entities present variations that may be inherited and passed on, was arguably the most important breakthrough in the self-organization of life. In this Perspective, the assumptions governing biological reproduction are confronted with physico-chemical principles that control the evolution of material systems. In biology, the reproduction of living organisms is never considered to be reversible, whereas microscopic reversibility is an essential principle in the physical description of matter. Here, we show that this discrepancy places constraints on the possibility of finding kinetic processes in the chemical world that are equivalent to natural selection in the biological one. Chemical replicators can behave in a similar fashion to living entities, provided that the reproduction cycle proceeds in a unidirectional way. For this to be the case, kinetic barriers must hinder the reverse process. The system must, thus, be held far from equilibrium and fed with a non-degraded (low-entropy) form of energy. The ensuing constraints must be factored in when proposing scenarios that account for the origin of life at the molecular level.
Identifiers
37128049What 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.