Version 1
: Received: 12 April 2024 / Approved: 15 April 2024 / Online: 16 April 2024 (03:21:32 CEST)
How to cite:
Kliska, N.; Nehaniv, C.L. Autocatalysis, Autopoiesis, and the Opportunity Cost of Individuality. Preprints2024, 2024040935. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202404.0935.v1
Kliska, N.; Nehaniv, C.L. Autocatalysis, Autopoiesis, and the Opportunity Cost of Individuality. Preprints 2024, 2024040935. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202404.0935.v1
Kliska, N.; Nehaniv, C.L. Autocatalysis, Autopoiesis, and the Opportunity Cost of Individuality. Preprints2024, 2024040935. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202404.0935.v1
APA Style
Kliska, N., & Nehaniv, C.L. (2024). Autocatalysis, Autopoiesis, and the Opportunity Cost of Individuality. Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202404.0935.v1
Chicago/Turabian Style
Kliska, N. and Chrystopher L. Nehaniv. 2024 "Autocatalysis, Autopoiesis, and the Opportunity Cost of Individuality" Preprints. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202404.0935.v1
Abstract
Ever since Varela and Maturana proposed the concept of autopoiesis as the minimal requirement for life, there has been a focus on cellular systems that erect topological boundaries to separate themselves from their surrounding environment. Here we reconsider whether the existence of such a spatial boundary is strictly necessary for self-producing entities. This work presents a novel computational model of a minimal autopoietic system inspired by dendrites and molecular dynamics simulations in three-dimensional space. A series of simulation experiments where the metabolic pathways of a particular autocatalytic set are successively inhibited until autocatalytic entities that could be considered autopoietic are produced. These entities maintain their distinctness in an environment containing multiple identical instances of the entities without the existence of a topological boundary. This gives rise to the concept of a metabolic boundary which manifests as emergent self-selection criteria for the processes of self-production without any need for unique identifiers. However, the adoption of such a boundary comes at a cost, as these autopoietic entities are less suited to their simulated environment than their autocatalytic counterparts. Finally, this work showcases a generalized metabolism-centered approach to the study of autopoiesis that can be applied to both physical and abstract systems alike.
Keywords
metabolic boundary; autopoiesis without spatial boundaries; characterization of living systems; self-production; autocatalysis; computational autopoiesis; metabolism; complex systems; emergence of individuality; network science.
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biology and Biotechnology
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.
