Is life impossible? Information, sex, and the origin of complex organisms.
Abstract
The earliest organisms are thought to have had high mutation rates. It has been asserted that these high mutation rates would have severely limited the information content of early genomes. This has led to a well-known “paradox” because, in contemporary organisms, the mechanisms that suppress mutations are quite complex and a substantial amount of information is required to construct these mechanisms. The paradox arises because it is not clear how efficient error-suppressing mechanisms could have evolved, and thus allowed the evolution of complex organisms, at a time when mutation rates were too high to permit the maintenance of very substantial amounts of information within genomes. Here, we use concepts from the formal theory of information to calculate the amount of genomic information that can be maintained. We identify conditions under which much higher levels of genomic information can be maintained than previously considered possible among origin-of-life researchers. In particular, we find that the highest levels of information are maintained when many genotypes produce identical phenotypes, and when reproduction occasionally involves recombination between multiple parental genomes. There is a good reason to believe that these conditions are relevant for very early organisms, and thus the results presented may provide a solution to a long-standing logical problem associated with the early evolution of life.
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Peck and Waxman used non-zero degradation in their model and did not analyze the extinction threshold.
“They used non-zero degradation in their model, while have forgotten to analyze the extinction threshold.”
From Lethal mutants and truncated selection together solve a paradox of the origin of life (2011) · cites this paper as [48]
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Lethal mutants and truncated selection together solve a paradox of the origin of life
Saakian, D. B., Biebricher, C. K., & Hu, C.-K. (2011) · PLoS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021904 · Cited by 27 · see citing works
- Authors
- Peck, J. R., & Waxman, D.
- Affiliations
- University of Sussex (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Peck, Joel R.
- Venue
- Evolution
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2010-10-22
- Volume
- 64
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 3300-3309
- ISSN
- 0014-3820 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2144790780
- Cited by
- 13
- References
- 37
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2019: 1 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 1 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 1.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Evolution (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Astronomy and Astrophysics › Origins and Evolution of Life
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Evolution and Genetic Dynamics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy and History of Science
- Keywords
- origin of life, mutation rate, error suppression, recombination, genotype-phenotype mapping, early evolution of life, information theory, sexual reproduction
- MeSH terms
- Adaptation, Physiological, Alleles, Animals, Computer Simulation, Epistasis, Genetic, Female, Genetics, Population, Male, Models, Genetic, Mutation, Phenotype, Population Dynamics, Reproduction, Sex Factors, Genome, Evolution, Molecular
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