2026/07/30 by Federico Pigozzi, Michael Levin
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #q-bio.PE
18 pages, 6 figures
arxiv created 2026/07/30 · arxiv updated 2026/07/31
Agents that exert causal power in the world are thought to be the product of selection among diverse replicators; what is the causal structure of a medium before replicators appear, and evolution takes hold? We studied information-theoretic dynamics of the popular GARD model that captures several dynamics thought to be important at life's origin and found that causal emergence predicted the initial appearance of self-replication. Moreover, interventions that drove causal emergence up increased the longevity of self-replicators, while interventions that drove causal emergence down decreased the abundance of these self-replicators, suggesting causal emergence as a functional control knob. Thus, progressive increases in integrated causality are detectable in active media before evolutionary dynamics begin to operate, which may have implications for the origin of life across highly diverse scenarios and for understanding the forces driving the rise in causal power observed in the biosphere on Earth.