The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology

the steps leading to the transition from no-life to a living protocell: The synthesis and accumulation of small organic molecules, including amino acids and nucleotides. Phosphates are also important, given that they are the backbone of RNA and DNA. The joining of such ingredients into larger molecules, such as proteins and nucleic acids. The aggre

One can define living beings as complex systems of limited size that are stable and that reproduce themselves.

basic ingredients for systems that could devise and improvise solutions to living that are emergent, versatile, adaptive, and robust. The new picture dispels the long-standing idea that living systems must be regarded as machines.

Monod proposed an analogy: Just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas. Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their

let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter (made of atoms) but information (made of bits) specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as