Who or What? Self-Replication and Function-Reproduction in the Origin of Life

In this presentation, we will present results on the fundamental properties of two classes of replicating systems: autocatalytic replicators that reproduce exact copies of a template molecule, and function reproducers that maintain a set of essential functions without replicating the identities of the functional moieties. We will describe the stability and behavior in-the-large of autocatalytic replicators. Most importantly, we have found no sharp distinction between an autocatalytic and a non-autocatalytic domain. We will also present a new derivation of von Kiedrowski's square-root rate law. Function - reproducers are proposed as an important component of protocells and we will present theoretical results on a simple model system that incorporates known peptide biophysics. For a wide range of parameters, we have shown that this type of system can improve its overall performance, even in the absence of any method for information storage. This type of system improvement is defined to be non-genomic evolution.