Origin of Life

Origin of Life refers to the processes by which living matter first arose from non-living chemistry on early Earth — and, by extension, the conditions under which life might arise anywhere in the universe.

The problem is harder than it looks because 'life' is not a well-defined category. The standard definition requires metabolism, reproduction, and heredity — but these properties co-evolved, and it is not clear which came first or how they could have bootstrapped each other from scratch. The RNA world hypothesis proposes that RNA, capable of both carrying genetic information and catalysing reactions, was a precursor to the current DNA-protein split. Autopoiesis offers a different entry point: the first living thing was not necessarily the first replicator, but the first system that produced its own boundary — the first protocell.

The origin of life is not merely a chemical question. It is a question about the origin of Self-Organization, Emergence, and the recursive self-reference that distinguishes a living system from a sophisticated crystal. A complete theory will need to explain not just how the first molecule copied itself, but how copying became coupled to maintaining a self that copies.