Kinetic Model of the Emergence of Autocatalysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal kinetic model demonstrating how autocatalytic, self-constructing objects can emerge spontaneously in an open system through stochastic productivity changes, highlighting a fundamental process of self-organization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mathematical framework for the emergence of autocatalytic objects, providing exact solutions and showing the inevitable rise of self-constructing entities.

Findings

Probability of self-constructing objects increases over time

Exact solutions for different mechanisms of productivity change

Emergence occurs even from initial zero probability

Abstract

We develop a formal model of the emergence of self-constructing objects (e.g. heteropolymers with autocatalytic capability) in an open system, which don't contain such objects initially. The objects are constructed from subunits (e.g. monomers). Each object is characterized by the difference of self-instructed reproduction and decomposition rate only. This difference, divided by a common dimensional constant, is called ``productivity''. Due to external influence the productivity of each object can randomly change. The system as a whole is subjected to external limitation: the total number of the objects is conserved (e.g., by the controlled influx of monomers). We consider such process as possibly simplest example of self-organization. We obtained exact solutions of our model for several presumed mechanisms of random change of the productivity. We have shown that the probability to find self-constructing objects in the system necessarily increases, even if initially it was equal to zero.