Gordon-Smith, Chris. “Non-template molecules designed for open-ended evolution.” In ECAL , pp. 268-275. 2011.
Theories of the Origin of Life can be categorised as ‘template replication first’ and ‘metabolism first’. A key question for metabolism first theories is whether metabolic systems can support open-ended evolution; this is related to the number of possible persistent states of such a system. Earlier work1 has demonstrated that artificial chemical systems can have
memory; an essential requirement for inheritance. The current paper extends this, taking a ‘proof of concept’ approach to the question of the number of persistent states. It shows
an artificial chemical network forming a ‘memory bank’ with many possible states. It also makes the link between chemical network structure and molecular structure, and provides a
design for a set of artificial molecular species for the memory bank network. Preliminary simulation results from the SimSoup artificial chemistry simulator are included, confirming
the operation of an initial set of ‘memory units’. The work supports the view that open-ended evolution can begin without requiring highly complex template molecules.