This year we celebrated Stuart Kauffman's 80th birthday. Kauffman has contributed many
original ideas to science. One of them is that of autocatalytic sets in the context of the origin …

We review lessons learned about evolutionary transitions from a bottom-up construction of
minimal life. We use a particular systemic protocell design process as a starting point for …

The emergence of evermore complex entities from prebiotic building blocks is a key aspect
of origins of life research. The RNA-world hypothesis posits that RNA oligomers known as …

The RNA world is one of the principal hypotheses to explain the emergence of living
systems on the prebiotic Earth. It posits that RNA oligonucleotides acted as both carriers of …

Template-directed replication of nucleic acids is at the essence of all living beings and a
major milestone for any origin of life scenario. We present an idealized model of prebiotic …

The emergence and maintenance of polymers with complex sequences pose a major
question in the study of the origin of life. To answer this, we study a model polymerization …

In recent years, studies in epigenetic inheritance in biological systems as well as studies on
evolution in non-biological systems eg, machine learning and robotics, have reopened the …

Critical experimental design issues connecting energy transduction and inheritable
information within a protocell are explored and elucidated. The protocell design utilizes a …

We introduce an aggregation process based on\emph {templating}, where a specified
number of constituent clusters must assemble on a larger aggregate, which serves as a …

We study a one-dimensional lattice of N sites each occupied by a mathematical'polymer,'that
is, is a binary random sequence of arbitrary length n, or equivalently, a rooted path of n links …