Artificial chemistries—a review
Artificial Life
Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Advances in Artificial Life
Crosstalk and the cooperation of collectively autocatalytic reaction networks
CEC'09 Proceedings of the Eleventh conference on Congress on Evolutionary Computation
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We describe a simple artificial chemistry which abstracts a small number of key features from the origin of life "replicator world" hypotheses. We report how this can already give rise to moderately complex and counter-intuitive evolutionary phenomena, including macro-evolutionary deterioration in replication fidelity (which corresponds to intrinsic replicator fitness in this model). We briefly describe the extension of this model to incorporate a higher, protocell, level of selection. We show that the interaction between the two levels of selection then serves to control parasitic exploitation at the molecular level, while still significantly constraining accessible evolutionary trajectories at the protocell level. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications for further work.