Transferable measurements of Heredity in models of the Origins of Life

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new metric to quantify heritable variation in dynamical systems, applicable even when traditional genomic structures are absent, and demonstrates its effectiveness across various models of life's origins.

Contribution

The paper presents a transferable metric for measuring heritability in models without explicit genomes, validated on multiple systems including the GARD model.

Findings

Accurately detects the number of species in test systems.

Correctly identifies heritable sets in clustered transition matrix models.

Reproduces prior heritability measurements in the GARD model.

Abstract

We propose a metric which can be used to compute the amount of heritable variation enabled by a given dynamical system. A distribution of selection pressures is used such that each pressure selects a particular fixed point via competitive exclusion in order to determine the corresponding distribution of potential fixed points in the population dynamics. This metric accurately detects the number of species present in artificially prepared test systems, and furthermore can correctly determine the number of heritable sets in clustered transition matrix models in which there are no clearly defined genomes. Finally, we apply our metric to the GARD model and show that it accurately reproduces prior measurements of the model's heritability.