So rather than asking how life arose on Earth, Cronin is asking How does life arise, period?

Highly interacting out-of-equilibrium systems, whether they are trees reacting to the change of seasons or chemical systems processing information about the inputs they receive, teach us that matter can compute. These systems tell us that computation precedes the origins of life just as much as information does. The chemical changes encoded by thes

low molecular weight compounds, even in the presence of suitable membranes, would not have been enough to produce life. The main problem for understanding and possibly reproducing the origin of life lies in the control of molecular order at the level of macromolecules. Proteins and nucleic acids are orderly sequences, and we need to understand how