Transferable measurements of heredity in models of the origins of life

Abstract

We propose a metric which can be used to compute the amount of heritable variation enabled by a given dynamical system. A distribution of selection pressures is used such that each pressure selects a particular fixed point via competitive exclusion in order to determine the corresponding distribution of potential fixed points in the population dynamics. This metric accurately detects the number of species present in artificially prepared test systems, and furthermore can correctly determine the number of heritable sets in clustered transition matrix models in which there are no clearly defined genomes. Finally, we apply our metric to the GARD model and show that it accurately reproduces prior measurements of the model's heritability.