Hiroki SayamaMay 14, 2023

This paper is finally out -- it was my true honor to be part of this fantastic international team
Our claim: The origins of behavior and organisms may be earlier than the origins of life

"Behaviour and the Origin of Organisms"
By Matthew Egbert et al.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11084-023-09635-0

Behaviour and the Origin of Organisms - Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres

It is common in origins of life research to view the first stages of life as the passive result of particular environmental conditions. This paper considers the alternative possibility: that the antecedents of life were already actively regulating their environment to maintain the conditions necessary for their own persistence. In support of this proposal, we describe ‘viability-based behaviour’: a way that simple entities can adaptively regulate their environment in response to their health, and in so doing, increase the likelihood of their survival. Drawing on empirical investigations of simple self-preserving abiological systems, we argue that these viability-based behaviours are simple enough to precede neo-Darwinian evolution. We also explain how their operation can reduce the demanding requirements that mainstream theories place upon the environment(s) in which life emerged.

SpringerLink
Show threadNicholas GuttenbergMay 14, 2023
@hirokisayama I wonder what the relationship is between these viability preserving systems and memory timescales. Is there an intrinsic memory scale, does the scale get determined by external timescales, or are there even internal divergent timescales. Sort of like, if this were a distinct era, do you remember enough of the past within that era such that 'progressing' can induce a transition to new behavior, or are you waiting for a rare event?
Show threadHiroki SayamaMay 15, 2023
@nichg Can you elaborate more? Memory requires internal representation, so I am not sure how that would be involved in our argument. The only "memory" I can think of would be the actual spatial location of an ante-organism.
Show threadNicholas Guttenberg
@hirokisayama in this context what I mean by memory is just the path dependence of the system - for how long and by how much is the history of the system able to influence it's current behavior. So the tendency towards equilibrium erases memory and things like hysteresis or multiple attractors or replicators are all ways in which you get a phase transition on one side of which the memory timescale diverges to infinity due to collective effects.
May 15, 2023 at 12:38pmWeb
Show threadNicholas GuttenbergMay 15, 2023
@hirokisayama If there's no memory then having anteorganisms for a second or a hundred million years doesn't make any difference beyond however long the next rare event would take - it's a memoryless Poisson process. But evolution for example is a process with memory, so running it for a million years makes the next possibilities differently distributed than running it for a day.
Show threadNicholas GuttenbergMay 15, 2023
@hirokisayama So if anteorganisms do modify the memory timescale or capacity of a system, or create a new infinite timescale, then that has a very different implication as to how they fit in a succession of developments than if they don't.
Show threadHiroki SayamaMay 16, 2023
@nichg ante-organisms may be memoryless in traditional sense.