Self-organization of Biological Macromolecules and Evolutionary Stable Strategies

Autocatalysis is a rather exceptional phenomenon in chemical kinetics and, when it appears in reaction networks, various characteristic phenomena like oscillations, spatial pattern formation or eventually chaotic behaviour are commonly observed. Biochemistry and biology, in contrary, have to deal with a class of molecules for which selfreplication became obligatory. These molecules, autocatalysts in a sense, are the polynucleotides, the nucleic acids or, later on in evolution, the genes. Self-organization, the most interesting attribute of the biosphere, appears to be essentially based on the capability of self-replication.