We describe the content and outcomes of the First Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution: Recent Progress and Future Milestones (OEE1), held during the ECAL 2015 conference at the University of York, UK, in July 2015. We briefly summarize the content of the workshopʼs talks, and identify the main themes that emerged from the open discussions. Two important conclusions from the discussions are: (1) the idea of pluralism about OEE-it seems clear that there is more than one interesting and important kind of OEE; and (2) the importance of distinguishing observable behavioral hallmarks of systems undergoing OEE from hypothesized underlying mechanisms that explain why a system exhibits those hallmarks. We summarize the different hallmarks and mechanisms discussed during the workshop, and list the specific systems that were highlighted with respect to particular hallmarks and mechanisms. We conclude by identifying some of the most important open research questions about OEE that are apparent in light of the discussions. The York workshop provides a foundation for a follow-up OEE2 workshop taking place at the ALIFE XV conference in Cancún, Mexico, in July 2016. Additional materials from the York workshop, including talk abstracts, presentation slides, and videos of each talk, are available at http://alife.org/ws/oee1.

A feature of many of the chemical systems plausibly involved in the origins of terrestrial life is that they are complex and messy-producing a wide range of compounds via a wide range of mechanisms. However, the fundamental behaviour of such systems is currently not well understood; we do not have the tools to make statistical predictions about such complex chemical networks. This is, in part, due to a lack of quantitative data from which such a theory could be built; specifically, functional measurements of messy chemical systems. Here, we propose that the pantheon of experimental approaches to the origins of life should be expanded to include the study of 'functional measurements'-the direct study of bulk properties of chemical systems and their interactions with other compounds, the formation of structures and other behaviours, even in cases where the precise composition and mechanisms are unknown.This article is part of the themed issue 'Reconceptualizing the origins of life'.

Contents1. Introduction1.1. A workshop and this document1.2. Framing origins of life science1.2.1. What do we mean by the origins of life (OoL)?1.2.2. Defining life1.2.3. How should we characterize approaches to OoL science?1.2.4. One path to life or many?2. A Strategy for Origins of Life Research2.1. Outcomes—key questions and investigations2.1.1. Domain 1: Theory2.1.2. Domain 2: Practice2.1.3. Domain 3: Process2.1.4. Domain 4: Future studies2.2. EON Roadmap2.3. Relationship to NASA Astrobiology Roadmap and Strategy documents and the European AstRoMap Appendix I Appendix II Supplementary Materials References

In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines 'autonomy'. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of approaches and categorize them by introducing a conceptual distinction between behavioral and constitutive autonomy. Differences in the autonomy of artificial and biological agents tend to be marginalized for the former and treated as absolute for the latter. We argue that with this distinction the apparent opposition can be resolved.

Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing replicator-first and metabolism-first approaches are merging into one integrated theory of individuation and evolution. We contribute to the maturation of this more inclusive approach by highlighting some problematic assumptions that still lead to an ximpoverished conception of the phenomenon of life. In particular, we argue that the new consensus has so far failed to consider the relevance of intermediate time scales. We propose that an adequate theory of life must account for the fact that all living beings are situated in at least four distinct time scales, which are typically associated with metabolism, motility, development, and evolution. In this view, self-movement, adaptive behavior, and morphological changes could have already been present at the origin of life. In order to illustrate this possibility, we analyze a minimal model of lifelike phenomena, namely, of precarious, individuated, dissipative structures that can be found in simple reaction-diffusion systems. Based on our analysis, we suggest that processes on intermediate time scales could have already been operative in prebiotic systems. They may have facilitated and constrained changes occurring in the faster- and slower-paced time scales of chemical self-individuation and evolution by natural selection, respectively.

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Summary1. Successional changes during sequential assembly of food webs were examined. This was carried out by numerical methods, drawing one species at a time from a species pool and obtaining the permanent (persistent) community emerging at each step. Interactions among species were based on some simple rules about body sizes of consumers and their prey, and community dynamics were described in terms of flows of biomass density. 2. Sequential assembly acted as a sieve on the communities, assembled communities having many properties different on average from those of feasible, stable communities taken at random from the species pools. 3. Time-series of community development were consistent with certain functions thought to go to an extremum (maximum or minimum) in ecosystem ecology, including a rapid early increase in net primary productivity and ascendency, although a clear trend in total biomass density was not evident and resilience decreased rather than increased. 4. In addition, more gradual changes in food web structure took place during succession to which the ecosystem goal functions were relatively insensitive. These changes included gradual increases in the number of species, invasion resistance, number of loops of length > 2 and number of prey species per consumer species. 5. We therefore argue that ecosystem and community dynamics can offer complementary insights into the process of ecological succession. The extremum principles of ecosystem ecology highlight some of the major properties of succession, whereas the community ecology sheds light on some more subtle changes taking place within the networks.