Organic Reactivity Matters for the Emergence of Life: Kinetic Barriers and Molecular Diversity Are Suggested as Crucial Factors by Emerging Autonomous System Models

The idea that organic chemistry can gradually self-organize towards the emergence of life has been challenged by views considering that the most important driver should be the existence of a crucial thermodynamic disequilibrium. In this work, past views are critically addressed and a mechanism through which disequilibrium can promote the emergence and development of organized systems is suggested. This analysis is based on the propensity of carbon to form covalent bonds with other elements, which usually corresponds to deep energy wells generating high kinetic barriers hindering reactions. Potential energy wells and the associated kinetic barriers are considered as storing a prepaid entropy loss within a potential energy surface and therefore constitute a potential giving room for subsequent self-organization processes. This potential associated with the notion of Kinetically Stable Thermodynamically Activated (KSTA) compounds gives rise to the possibility of alternative pathways based on non-linear autocatalytic processes. As other systems working in a far-from-equilibrium context, like molecular machines, kinetic parameters are crucial for determining how they proceed and how they change, which suggests that interactions between the fields of molecular machines and of the emergence of life could be mutually beneficial.