Abstract The prebiotic evolution of chemical systems is characterized by their development of increasingly complex levels of molecular organization. This development is dependent upon the capacity of these systems to acquire and transform chemical information. The informational content of a chemical system can be divided into configurational, energetic, and thermal contributions. The thermal information is specifically related to the number of molecules in the system, and is therefore a function of molecular size or complexity. The molecular complexity of a chemical system can be increased through reactions in which reductions in configurational or energetic information are coupled to increases in thermal information, as limited by the second law of thermodynamics.
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