@2001grandCreation proposes two additional mechanisms to autocatalysis that enable the complicated networks of living things to persist:
- Encapsulation: the ability for components of autocatalytic networks to separate into discrete “packets” or “containers” of high concentration. Ideally, these capsules “keep the insides in but not all of the outsides out,” and can reform quickly into smaller “daughter” capsules when broken.
- Encoding: the use of templates to improve the evolvability and survivability of chemical networks; “today’s living organisms do not rely on the network to be its own description: they store the description separately from their function, in their DNA.”
At a cellular level, the functional aspects of the network can even be considered auxiliary to the primary template of encoding:
The primary autocatalytic network, which includes the DNA protein synthesis and DNA replication functions, is acting as a host to a set of ‘guest’ enzymes, which tag along for the ride and presumably confer some indirect advantage on the cell, even though they play no part in its metabolism.