Hindawi Complexity Volume 2018, Article ID 9376183, 21 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9376183 Research Article Prebiotic Geochemical Automata at the Intersection of Radiolytic Chemistry, Physical Complexity, and Systems Biology Zachary R. Adam ,1,2 Albert C. Fahrenbach ,3 Betul Kacar ,2,3,4 and Masashi Aono 5 1 Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA 2Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, Seattle, WA, USA 3Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan 4Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Department of Astronomy, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA 5Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University, Kanagawa, Japan Correspondence should be addressed to Zachary R. Adam;
[email protected] Received 27 October 2017; Accepted 20 February 2018; Published 26 June 2018 Academic Editor: Roberto Natella Copyright © 2018 Zachary R. Adam et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Te tractable history of life records a successive emergence of organisms composed of hierarchically organized cells and greater degrees of individuation. Te lowermost object level of this hierarchy is the cell, but it is unclear whether the organizational attributes of living systems extended backward through prebiotic stages of chemical evolution. If the systems biology attributes of the cell were indeed templated upon prebiotic synthetic relationships between subcellular objects, it is not obvious how to categorize object levels below the cell in ways that capture any hierarchies which may have preceded living systems.