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Life Finds A Way: Emergence of Cooperative Structures in Adaptive Threshold Networks
Sean P. Maley, Carlos Gershenson, Stuart A. Kauffman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13253

Life Finds A Way: Emergence of Cooperative Structures in Adaptive Threshold Networks
There has been a long debate on how new levels of organization have evolved. It might seem unlikely, as cooperation must prevail over competition. One well-studied example is the emergence of autocatalytic sets, which seem to be a prerequisite for the evolution of life. Using a simple model, we investigate how varying bias toward cooperation versus antagonism shapes network dynamics, revealing that higher-order organization emerges even amid pervasive antagonistic interactions. In general, we o…