On the role of complementarity in biogenesis: a critical phenomenon approach.

One of the important steps of the prebiotic stage of the origin of life is the increase in information content resulting from the transition of a random assembly of oligomers into a self-replicating polymer. We describe that crucial step as a critical phenomenon, treated within the renormalization group framework. We show that the diversity-selection duality of Darwinian evolution is achieved at this state if we start from four different monomers capable of forming two complementary pairs.