Emergence of Genetic Coding: An Information-Theoretic Model

This paper introduces a simple model for evolutionary dynamics approaching the “coding threshold”, where the capacity to symbolically represent nucleic acid sequences emerges in response to a change in environmental conditions. The model evolves a dynamical system, where a conglomerate of primitive cells is coupled with its potential encoding, subjected to specific environmental noise and inaccurate internal processing. The separation between the conglomerate and the encoding is shown to become beneficial in terms of preserving the information within the noisy environment. This selection pressure is captured information-theoretically, as an increase in mutual information shared by the conglomerate across time. The emergence of structure and useful separation inside the coupled system is accompanied by self-organization of internal processing, i.e. an increase in complexity within the evolving system.