The Structure of Autocatalytic Sets: Evolvability, Enablement, and Emergence

TL;DR

This paper investigates the internal structure of autocatalytic sets, revealing how they can be decomposed into smaller subsets, which impacts their evolvability, enablement, and emergence, with potential applications to complex systems like ecologies and economies.

Contribution

It introduces methods to decompose autocatalytic sets into smaller subsets and discusses their implications for understanding complex system dynamics.

Findings

Autocatalytic sets can be decomposed into smaller autocatalytic subsets.

Decomposition of these sets influences their evolvability and emergence.

Potential applications extend to ecologies and economies.

Abstract

This paper presents new results from a detailed study of the structure of autocatalytic sets. We show how autocatalytic sets can be decomposed into smaller autocatalytic subsets, and how these subsets can be identified and classified. We then argue how this has important consequences for the evolvability, enablement, and emergence of autocatalytic sets. We end with some speculation on how all this might lead to a generalized theory of autocatalytic sets, which could possibly be applied to entire ecologies or even economies.