Most attempts to define life have concentrated on individual theories, mentioning others
hardly at all, but here we compare all of the major current theories. We begin by asking how …

The nature of life has been a topic of interest from the earliest of times, and efforts to explain
it in mechanistic terms date at least from the 18th century. However, the impressive …

The formation of a self-sustaining autocatalytic chemical network is a necessary but not
sufficient condition for the origin of life. The question of whether such a network could form …

Self-sustaining autocatalytic networks play a central role in living systems, from metabolism
at the origin of life, simple RNA networks and the modern cell, to ecology and cognition. A …

This year we celebrated Stuart Kauffman's 80th birthday. Kauffman has contributed many
original ideas to science. One of them is that of autocatalytic sets in the context of the origin …

The concept of an autocatalytic network of reactions that can form and persist, starting from
just an available food source, has been formalized by the notion of a reflexively autocatalytic …

Metabolism across all known living systems combines two key features. First, all of the
molecules that are required are either available in the environment or can be built up from …

Self-sustaining autocatalytic chemical networks represent a necessary, though not sufficient
condition for the emergence of early living systems. These networks have been formalised …

The emergence of an autocatalytic network from an available set of elements is a
fundamental step in early evolutionary processes, such as the origin of metabolism. Given …

We show that in a particular model of catalytic reaction systems, known as the binary
polymer model, there is a mathematical concordance between two versions of the model:(1) …