Toward a systems view of life’s origins: Modeling the emergence of complexity across chemical, informational and ecological levels

Understanding how life emerged from non-living matter remains one of the most profound challenges in science. Empirical constraints and the scarcity of ancient evidence make this question particularly suitable for theoretical and computational approaches. Here, we review recent progress toward a systems-level understanding of life’s origins, focusing on how mathematical models describe the progressive emergence of complexity across three interconnected levels: chemical, informational, and ecological. At the chemical level, models of autocatalytic networks and protometabolic organization capture how self-sustaining reaction systems and feedback loops could arise spontaneously under out-of-equilibrium conditions. At the informational level, studies of polymerization and template-assisted replication of biopolymers shed light on how simple molecular systems could give rise to the emergence of catalytic RNA, genetic heritable information and error-prone molecular evolution. Finally, ecological and thermodynamic models illuminate how protocells and subsequent microbial consortia might have diversified, interacted, and self-organized into the first ecosystems. Together, these approaches highlight a sequence of transitions and bifurcations that call for the development of a coherent framework for studying life’s origins and early evolution, grounded in complex systems theory, prebiotic chemistry, and ecological dynamics. We believe that such an integrative modeling effort will be essential for identifying universal principles underlying the emergence of living systems, bridging the current gap between molecular and ecological levels of organization, and guiding future experimental and computational research in origins-of-life studies. • Recent progress toward a comprehensive, systems-level understanding of life’s emergence is reviewed. • Mathematical models capture nonlinear phenomena behind key origins-of-life transitions. • Dynamical principles are shared across chemical, informational and ecological levels.