Evolution from Proto-Life to Metabolic Networks

CSSS Santa Fe 2007 Home Faculty U.S. Visa Requirements Participants Schedule Readings Logistics Travel Projects & Working Groups Tutorials After Hours Photos T-shirt Design Forum Project Presentations Final Papers

First meeting scheduled for Thu, Jun 7, 10:15am after the lecture.

People

(Just sign up yourself, if interested, or, whom I've just forgotten)

• Kathryn Cooper
• Amelie Veron
• Wenyun Zuo
• Christian Darabos
• Tim Johann
• Vikas Shah

 Joshua L. Payne

Idea

Given the concept of the Metabolism First Hypothesis, how did early simple and essentially random reaction networks evolve into ones that exhibit characteristics of scale-free and small-world networks? What physically meaningful rules may we find that can lead to this?

Things to consider

• No predefined goal! Besides evolvability.
• How to define fitness? Or, how to define selection without a known fitness function?
  • Yes, I though it might be interesting to run simulations without fitness and selection, just based on the rules of evolution and see what comes out -- Amelie
    • What to do about the explosion of possibilities? [Tim]
• How can we get increasing complexity of metabolites?

Readings

• nearly anything by Stuart Kauffman (I just borrowed 'The Origins of Order').