Emergence of Selection in Prebiotic Chemical Systems

Determine how selection first emerges in prebiotic chemical systems prior to the existence of replication, heredity, and Darwinian evolution.

Background

Understanding how selection arises before genetic replication, heredity, and Darwinian evolution is a foundational challenge in origins-of-life research. The paper proposes Assembly Theory as a framework to quantify selection based on distributions of objects and their assembly indices, introducing metrics such as the exploration ratio and ensemble assembly A.

Within this context, the authors experimentally compare undirected peptide-forming reactions with enzyme-influenced reactions to demonstrate measurable signatures of selection. However, the broader mechanistic question of how selection first appears in purely chemical systems—independent of biological replication—remains explicitly identified as an open question.