LAUSR

Significance The road to life is punctuated by transitions toward complexity, from astrochemistry to biomolecules and eventually, to living organisms. Disentangling the origin of such transitions is a challenge where the application of complexity and network theory has not been fully exploited. We introduce a computational framework in which simple networks simulate the most basic building bricks of life and interact to form complex structures, leading to an explosion of diversity when the parameter representing the environment reaches a critical value. While this model is abstract and unrelated to chemical theory, its predictions reliably mimic the molecular evolution in the interstellar medium during the transition toward chemical complexity, suggesting that the rules leading to the emergence of complexity may be universal.