Stigmergic gene transfer and emergence of universal coding

We consider a simple information‐theoretic model for evolutionary dynamics approaching the “coding threshold,” where the capacity to symbolically represent nucleic acid sequences emerges in response to a change in environmental conditions. We study the conditions when a coupling between the dynamics of a “proto‐cell” and its proto‐symbolic representation becomes beneficial in terms of preserving the proto‐cell's information in a noisy environment. In particular, we are interested in understanding the behavior at the “error threshold” level, which, in our case, turns out to be a whole “error interval.” The useful coupling is accompanied by self‐organization of internal processing, i.e., an increase in complexity within the evolving system. Second, we study whether and how different proto‐cells can stigmergically share such information via a joint encoding, even if they have slightly different individual dynamics. Implications for the emergence of biological genetic code are discussed.