How crystals that sense and respond to their environments could evolve |
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Authors: | Rebecca Schulman Erik Winfree |
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Affiliation: | (1) California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA |
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Abstract: | An enduring mystery in biology is how a physical entity simple enough to have arisen spontaneously could have evolved into
the complex life seen on Earth today. Cairns-Smith has proposed that life might have originated in clays which stored genomes
consisting of an arrangement of crystal monomers that was replicated during growth. While a clay genome is simple enough to
have conceivably arisen spontaneously, it is not obvious how it might have produced more complex forms as a result of evolution.
Here, we examine this possibility in the tile assembly model, a generalized model of crystal growth that has been used to
study the self-assembly of DNA tiles. We describe hypothetical crystals for which evolution of complex crystal sequences is
driven by the scarceness of resources required for growth. We show how, under certain circumstances, crystal growth that performs
computation can predict which resources are abundant. In such cases, crystals executing programs that make these predictions
most accurately will grow fastest. Since crystals can perform universal computation, the complexity of computation that can
be used to optimize growth is unbounded. To the extent that lessons derived from the tile assembly model might be applicable
to mineral crystals, our results suggest that resource scarcity could conceivably have provided the evolutionary pressures
necessary to produce complex clay genomes that sense and respond to changes in their environment.
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Keywords: | Evolution Complexity Universality Crystals Self-assembly Tiles Metabolism |
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