Abstract:
Traditionally, there has been a dispute about whether metabolism or replication came first during the origin of life. Yet both of these approaches are in implicit agreement that the first forms of life were basically passive. That shared assumption has begun to be challenged by a new generation of metabolism-first approaches, emphasizing that movement and adaptive behavior could have played an important role right from the start (1-3). I introduce this theory of a behavior-based origin of life and consider how it can help to inform our thinking about the origins of the genetic system.

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