A Structural Interpretation of Autocatalytic Chemical Evolution: Reframing Kauffman's Theory Through Relational Collapse

Autocatalytic network theory proposes that life emerges when chemical reactions form self-sustaining,mutually reinforcing networks, a framework first articulated in detail within early complexity-based models of chemical organization (Kauffman 1993). Subsequent work in evolutionary theory has shown that such networks can acquire proto-heritable structure long before the appearance of genetic templates, suggesting that coherence may arise from network-level dynamics rather than molecular instruction (Szathmáry & Maynard Smith 1995). More recent approaches emphasize the informational and causal architecture underlying emergent chemical organization, reframing early metabolism as a system capable of stabilizing its own trajectories (Walker & Davies 2013). Yet across these perspectives, the underlying mechanism that stabilizes autocatalytic networks has remained conceptually unresolved. This paper introduces a relational-collapse framework to interpret autocatalytic chemical evolution, arguing that the dynamics observed in these systems can be understood as the continual collapse of multiple possible reaction pathways into a single stabilized trajectory. This structural operator clarifies why coherence emerges, why certain networks persist whileothers fail, and how early chemical systems acquired the capacity for open-ended evolution