Abiogenesis as the origin of selection. An alternative to the Oparin-Haldane model

Juan Rivas-Santisteban 

The emergence of life from non-living matter remains one of the most profound unresolved questions in natural philosophy. Current paradigms largely inherit the Oparin-Haldane assumption that abiogenesis is preceded by a prolonged accumulation of traits through nonadaptive (e.g. self-organisation) and adaptive processes. Yet this raises a legitimate question: how can adaptive evolution occur before abiogenesis? Natural selection requires both a persistent resemblance between parental and offspring characters (i.e. heredity) and a source of transmissible variation (i.e. mutation); however the emergence of these properties is itself the central problem of abiogenesis. Here, instead, I describe a spontaneous selection model in which heritable variation arises abiotically, and therefore prior to the action of natural selection. The Price equation, although merely a mathematical tool, can help us think about the evolvability of selection itself. Selection is best understood as the non-null covariance between a trait value and its fitness, a quantity that itself evolves. Prior to abiogenesis, this covariance should be effectively zero. By removing the assumption that slow adaptive evolution must precede abiogenesis, this model defines a null expectation in which imperfect heredity is absent in prebiotic systems, a prediction that can be experimentally falsified.