  Ultraviolet light incident on organic material can initiate its spontaneous
dissipative structuring into chromophores which can then catalyze their own
replication. This may have been the case for one of the most ancient of all
chromophores dissipating the Archean UVC photon flux, the nucleic acids. Under
the empirically established imperative of increasing entropy production,
nucleic acids with affinity to particular amino acids which foment UVC photon
dissipation would have been "thermodynamically selected" through this
dissipation-replication relation. Indeed, we show here that those amino acids
with characteristics most relevant to fomenting UVC photon dissipation are
precisely those with greatest affinity to their codons or anticodons. This
could provide a physical-chemical mechanism for the accumulation of information
in nucleic acids relevant to the dissipation of the externally imposed photon
potential. This mechanism could provide a non-equilibrium thermodynamic
foundation, based on increasing global entropy production of the biosphere, for
the tenants of Darwinian natural selection. We show how this mechanism might
have begun operating at the origin of life in the Archean, and how, in fact, it
still operates today, albeit indirectly through complex biosynthetic pathways
now operating in the visible.
