Figure 1

A schematic representation of the structure of our model. The arrows represent the direction of causal influence (see main text). The RNA secondary structures depicted under "Phenotype" are constructed from a genotype of the C-catalyst (the left one is from the catalytic strand; the right one is from the template strand) (see main text and Fig. 2 for the C-catalyst). The following can be skipped until Discussion: It is interesting to note that while the direction of causal influence is from information to organization, the direction of functional influence is from organization to information.