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Diversity and survival of artificial lifeforms under sedimentation and random motion

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Abstract

Cellular automata are often used to explore the numerous possible scenarios of what could have occurred at the origins of life and before, during the prebiotic ages, when very simple molecules started to assemble and organise into larger catalytic or informative structures, or to simulate ecosystems. Artificial self-maintained spatial structures emerge in cellular automata and are often used to represent molecules or living organisms. They converge generally towards homogeneous stationary soups of still-life creatures. It is hard for an observer to believe they are similar to living systems, in particular because nothing is moving anymore within such simulated environments after few computation steps, because they present isotropic spatial organisation, because the diversity of self-maintained morphologies is poor, and because when stationary states are reached the creatures are immortal. Natural living systems, on the contrary, are composed of a high diversity of creatures in interaction having limited lifetimes and generally present a certain anisotropy of their spatial organisation, in particular frontiers and interfaces. In the present work, we propose that the presence of directional weak fields such as gravity may counter-balance the excess of mixing and disorder caused by Brownian motion and favour the appearance of specific regions, i.e. different strata or environmental layers, in which physical–chemical conditions favour the emergence and the survival of self-maintained spatial structures including living systems. We test this hypothesis by way of numerical simulations of a very simplified ecosystem model. We use the well-known Game of Life to which we add rules simulating both sedimentation forces and thermal agitation. We show that this leads to more active (vitality and biodiversity) and robust (survival) dynamics. This effectively suggests that coupling such physical processes to reactive systems allows the separation of environments into different milieux and could constitute a simple mechanism to form ecosystem frontiers or elementary interfaces that would protect and favour the development of fragile auto-poietic systems.

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Notes

  1. This term, used by Rennard (2008), refers obviously to our wishes to give life to amorphous matter, but it probably also hides additional meanings: the facts that such models have a purpose (not only to “be themselves” but to serve our understanding), that we control them and that they are designed as reflects of our own limited knowledge of what is life.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TIMC-IMAG Laboratory, Université Grenoble Alpes - CNRS UMR 5525, Domaine de la Merci, 38700, La Tronche, France

    Nicolas Glade

  2. Cell and Plant Physiology Laboratory (LPCV), CNRS UMR 5168 - CEA - Université Grenoble Alpes, Institut de Recherche en Sciences et Technologies pour le Vivant, Commissariat à l′Energie Atomique Grenoble, 38054, Grenoble Cedex 9, France

    Olivier Bastien

  3. LaTIM, INSERM UMR 1101 - Université de Bretagne Occidentale, CHRU Morvan-2, Av. Foch, 29609, Brest Cedex, France

    Pascal Ballet

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Correspondence to Nicolas Glade.

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Glade, N., Bastien, O. & Ballet, P. Diversity and survival of artificial lifeforms under sedimentation and random motion. Theory Biosci. 136, 153–167 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-017-0254-1

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