Fernando Baquero, Val F Lanza, Carlos Briones

Evolutionary processes acting on molecule populations and their assemblies preceded the origin of living organisms. These prebiotic world entities were (re)produced; that is, independently produced by the assembly of their components, following an iterative process giving rise to identical entities, recalling the progeny resulting from self-reproduction. Before the dawn of life, natural selection favored the more stable molecular assemblies, some possibly modifying their own structure, or their environment, thereby acquiring some kind of function. In association with others (as when encapsulated together by a vesicle), they found a role when their spatial-temporal coexistence favored the selection of the ensemble. A few successful combinations of those proto-organs, and their maintenance derived from their coded-structural information, might have evolved into self-replication, followed by the extinction of a myriad of looser ensembles. Thus, interactions between encapsulated proto-organs would have had a much higher probability of evolving into organisms than interactions among simpler molecules. Organs might have preceded organisms.