The emergence and evolution of life are a continuum of processes governed by thermodynamics, which allows the continuous formation of increasingly complex systems able to store information and utilize energy. The current paradigm of evolution involves vertical inheritance, where organisms inherit genetic information from their progenitors and pass this genetic heritage to their descendants through reproduction. However, a growing body of evidence supports an alternative view of evolution as a distributed biochemical phenomenon with horizontal exchange of genetic information between individuals and even species. One of such sources is environmental DNA (eDNA), which is genetic material present in the environment but not enclosed in any organism. In this article, we hypothesize that eDNA may be a permissive source of genetic material that is used by molecules as a platform for molecular interactions, including recombination.
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