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Origin of Life: A Symmetry-Breaking Physical Phase Transition
Version 1
: Received: 26 October 2024 / Approved: 28 October 2024 / Online: 28 October 2024 (14:52:29 CET)
How to cite: Feistel, R. Origin of Life: A Symmetry-Breaking Physical Phase Transition. Preprints 2024, 2024102188. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202410.2188.v1 Feistel, R. Origin of Life: A Symmetry-Breaking Physical Phase Transition. Preprints 2024, 2024102188. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202410.2188.v1
Abstract
The origin of life has previously been subject to numerous studies and hypotheses. Typically, related models focus on the emergence of chemical networks such as the RNA world or the Krebs energy cycle. Here, the onset of life is described as a symmetry-breaking kinetic phase transition of the II. kind. The novel symmetry of life is the arbitrariness of code that is fundamental to symbolic information processing, coining all forms of life from the very beginning. Symbols evolved from non-symbolic, structural information of the inanimate physical world. The responsible transition process had been discovered a century ago in behavioural biology, regarded as 'ritualisation'. Physical properties of this transition include neutral Lyapunov stability and critical fluctuations of the associated Goldstone modes. As a conceptual model, a hypothetical simple molecular ritualisation process is suggested, along with the emergent semiotics of symbolic information processing.
Keywords
Life; Symbols; Information; Ritualisation; Symmetry; Arbitrariness
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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