Primordial Sex Facilitates the Emergence of Evolution

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that protocell fusion accelerates the emergence of evolvable life forms by changing the scaling of production time from exponential to algebraic, highlighting the importance of compartment interactions in early life evolution.

Contribution

The study introduces a model showing that protocell fusion significantly reduces the time to produce evolvable protocells, providing new insights into origin of life mechanisms.

Findings

Fusion reduces the scaling of protocell production time from exponential to algebraic.

Compartments sharing information via fusion facilitate faster evolution.

Implications for understanding early biological evolution and life origins.

Abstract

Compartments are ubiquitous throughout biology, yet their importance stretches back to the origin of cells. In the context of origin of life, we assume that a protocell, a compartment enclosing functional components, requires $N$ components to be evolvable. We take interest in the timescale in which a minimal evolvable protocell is produced. We show that when protocells fuse and share information, the time to produce an evolvable protocell scales algebraically in $N$, in contrast to an exponential scaling in the absence of fusion. We discuss the implications of this result for origins of life, as well as other biological processes.