Biology Reference
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As a consequence, a NTSM organization is capable of a true complexity
'bootstrapping', in the sense that (some of) the new organizational varieties
(that can be generated) can in turn create new levels of functionality and SM.
The creation of increasingly larger and richer chemical networks can even bring
forth functionally hierarchical organizations, as for instance, cellular organiza-
tions, which in turn generate new forms of SM, increasingly autonomous of the
environmental conditions.
3.2. The problem of the origin of NTSMSs
So far the conditions of possibility for the appearance of a prebiotic evolution
were analyzed, concluding that the key step is the appearance of certain kind of
chemical systems based on what we have called a NTSM organization.
We do not know how these kinds of systems could have appeared, neither what
the threshold is of complexity of the chemical aggregates necessary to generate
them, nor under which set of boundary conditions. These are questions whose
answers depend largely on empirical research. Unlike ordinary examples of DS
that appear spontaneously, present-day life has created a wide organizational
'no-man's-land' (because life has changed primitive conditions and also because
of its capacity to eliminate less efficient competitors). This space has probably
been occupied by a long sequence of increasingly complex systems (which must
in turn have eliminated their precursors). Thus, the appearance of a NTSM
organization is nowadays only possible in lab experimental conditions.
We may imagine that a great variety of chemical systems appeared on spe-
cial places of the Earth (or other similar planets) during the period of chemical
prebiotic evolution that took place when the planet cooled down. Among these
systems, some would constitute autocatalytic cycles, leading to increasingly large
self-maintaining networks, namely, systems where all components and compo-
nent aggregates (directly involved in their organizational dynamics) must be
products of a reaction network that constructs itself. As Kauffman (1993) has
pointed out, 'The origin of life was a quite probable consequence of the collec-
tive properties of catalytic polymers. More probably () many properties of
organisms may be probably emergent collective properties of their constituents.
The origins of such properties then find their explanation in principles of self-
organization rather than sufficiency of time.' In support of this claim, Kauffman
(Farmer et al., 1986) and more recently, also other authors (Fontana, 1992, Steel,
2000, Hordijk & Steel, 2004) have presented different computer simulations
showing the emergence of this kind of systems from a small set of relatively
simple components. 14 However, most of these simulations ignore or neglect the
14 By now the only evidence of the spontaneous appearance of NTSM systems is computational.
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