A niche construction-based perspective on chemical evolution before replication and reproduction

Conceptual analysis has, in the past decades, established that evolution by natural selection (ENS) can occur without reproduction (1–6). This theoretical advancement has significant imports for research on the origins of life that have yet to be explored. In this paper, we introduce and defend a niche construction-based account of evolution by natural selection without reproduction (ENSwR, pronounced like “answer”), which leads to three insights regarding Darwinian evolution at the origins of life. First, we show through ENSwR the plausibility of Darwinian evolution in the prebiotic world; second, ENSwR provides a novel explanatory framework that supports origins of life theories in which autocatalytic sets of chemical reactions play a central role; third, we argue that inorganic catalytic molecules (rather than autocatalytic sets (7–9)) are relevant units of selection to understand the origins of life prior to reproduction and replication. This third argument is especially important for the field, as it helps bridge the gap between chemical and biological evolution (10).