How Chaos Gives Birth to Life: The Secret Switch express
A jazz ensemble: at first, a cacophony of random notes. Then — a catchy riff that plays over and over. Such is the riddle of the origin of life — only in the language of chemistry. In a computer model of random molecular interactions called GARD, scientists recreated the primordial 'soup', where simple compounds float around, sometimes helping each other assemble into larger chains.
An invisible switch flipped. When the 'causal strength' crosses the threshold, molecules capable of copying themselves spontaneously emerge in the mixture. Moreover, by artificially strengthening or weakening it, you can extend or shorten the lives of such replicators. collective behavior of molecules acts as a volume knob: turn it up, the riff plays louder and clearer; turn it down, it fades. Such a conductor's console works in any active 'soup'—even before evolution takes up its score.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2607.28250v1
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.
Even in a completely chaotic mixture, the emergence of life can be predicted, just measure its 'causal potential'.