Young, Thomas. “Towards emergent replicators in a molecular artificial chemistry.” (2017).
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All evolutionary systems, natural or artificial, are built from essentially the same three elements: variation, inheritance and selection. What then distinguishes the process of biological evolution by natural selection, which produces such impressive outcomes, from the relatively underwhelming results of artificial digital evolution? We focus on one aspect of this: the emergence of simple replicators from a lower-level foundation in an artificial chemistry. Previous work has either supplied a handbuilt basic (or shortcut) replicator for evolution to work upon, or has provided direct support for replication in the chemistry itself.