Did Selection Start Before Life? A Testable Idea About Chemistry That Remembers

Good conditions explain when complex things become possible. They do not explain why complex things pile up. Most arrangements of matter fall apart, and many lasting things stay simple. Our research desk proposes a single rule for what makes the difference, and suggests it was already at work before the first cell.

The desk's rule has two parts. First, a structure that survives must bias what forms next. Second, adding interdependent parts must help that influence persist. When both hold, complexity accumulates. When simpler forms persist better, selection should favor simplicity.

Living things meet both conditions through reproduction and inheritance. The desk argues that non-living systems sometimes do too, through crystal surfaces, chemical products that feed later reactions, or altered surroundings.

It is careful about the limits. A durable mineral just sitting in a rock is filtered by survival but does not improve. Calling every lasting effect inheritance, the desk says, would make the idea empty.

• Strong fit: life, language and farming. In each, earlier successes are kept and recombined, and they shape later possibilities. • Plausible fit: early chemistry and mineral surfaces, which can favor particular reactions. • Weak fit: stars and planets. Earlier bodies change later ones, but there is no clear competition among variants that copy themselves. • No fit: the Big Bang. There is no known population of earlier universes to select from. The desk concedes this.

Origin-of-life chemistry offers real footholds. In 2020, Ruiqin Yi, Albert Fahrenbach and colleagues reported in PNAS a continuous reaction network that produced RNA building-block precursors from simple salts, phosphate and hydrogen cyanide. It ran without careful, timed additions of reagents, driven by radiation and drying. Each stage's products fed the next.

In a paper published online in 2019, Bruce Damer and David Deamer proposed in Astrobiology that protocells cycling through wet, dry and moist phases in hot-spring pools would subject polymers to combinatorial selection. Their model has early structures shaping which later ones survive.

These are close to the desk's mechanism. We found no direct comparison of identical chemistry, with and without the memory of earlier structures, though we did not run a systematic literature search. That comparison is what is missing.

The desk proposes thirty matched pairs of sterile chemical reactors containing minerals, run through one hundred feeding cycles. In one reactor of each pair, molecular and surface organization is kept between cycles. In the other, it is erased while ingredients and energy are restored to match.

Isotope tracing would show which products help make later products. The prediction: after one hundred cycles, the reactors that keep their organization will have at least 25% more verified, mutually supporting reactions. The desk gives this a 60% chance.

It flags the main weakness itself. Erasing structure may also change which chemicals are available, so a difference could reflect supply rather than memory. Independent checks would be needed to rule that out. This is where the argument is weakest.

Aging biology has its own version of this question. Some damage persists and shapes what comes next: a misfolded protein that seeds more misfolding, a senescent cell that pushes neighbors toward senescence, a scar that changes how tissue heals. These are self-reinforcing structures, and they resemble the kind of chemistry that remembers. The individual examples are well established, though the senescence spread is shown mainly in cell and animal studies.

Extrapolating from the desk's hypothesis, good longevity strategy might be partly about which structures you let persist, and clearing damage early, before it shapes the next round, might matter more than repairing it late. This is our extrapolation. Neither source above covers aging, and it has not been tested.

These lines are general suggestions, not findings from the sources above, and the first one applies the untested hypothesis to ordinary lab results.

• Consider early warning signs, such as rising blood pressure, glucose or liver enzymes, as possible early steps in a self-reinforcing process, not a minor number. This framing is our extrapolation. • Ask your doctor about trends across several years of lab results, not just whether today's value is in range. • Be cautious with supplements marketed as clearing senescent cells. Human evidence remains limited; discuss any such plan with your physician first.

• A preregistered reactor experiment with and without retained organization, using isotope tracing. • Methods for distinguishing true chemical memory from simple changes in ingredient supply. • Aging research on self-propagating damage, such as protein seeding and senescence spread, and whether early clearance changes outcomes.