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NOT ABSOLUTE. “Life is not an absolute quality which suddenly appeared, it gradually emerged at the beginning of the evolution. [...] there is no clear boundary line.” (Cairns-Smith, 1990). https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

HOLY GRAIL. "Von Neumann proved in the 1950s that machines exist that are able to make everything including copies of themselves, as long as the construction process can be expressed as recipes (algorithms). This defines the Universal Constructor, which is a mathematical machine, which has not yet been implemented." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

LIFE AS CONTINUITY. "There is now a growing consensus among biologists concerning this continuity." https://lnkd.in/dEj5vVD View in LinkedIn

ALCHEMICAL GOLD. "The intellectual part for me, what has kept me up at night, is this fascination with why materials in certain forms are alive and in other forms are not. Trying to figure out the secret of how to put materials together so they dance and become alive." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

HARD TO DEFINE. "A bewildering variety of forms of life surrounds us, but we usually have no difficulty distinguishing the living from the non-living. That flower, that mushroom, that worm, that bird are alive; that rock, that mountain, that river, that cloud are not. Yet it is notoriously difficult to say what life is, exactly." https://lnkd.in/da-Njua View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION FIRST. "Once you have replication, then you can have evolution, but you don't have evolution before you have replication. At least I don't think so." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PROPERTIES. "The individual building blocks of the protocell can't explain the higher-level structure and its functionalities when we put them together. They are an emergent structure. So we have to put a set of appropriate molecular aggregates together to get the first replicator." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

ENERGETIC PREREQUISITE. "The way we have to get to a system that can undergo evolution is, we first need self-replication. We need to put materials together in a way such that the result of their interactions is that the whole system replicates. To make that happen you need free energy to drive the whole thing. That’s why metabolism is also necessary as it can drive the replication process." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

FIRST STEP. "How do you get the first system to replicate? There's a process called self-assembly where you can aggregate materials and suddenly get new properties. For instance, if you have a lipid molecule in water, if you allow many, many lipid molecules to swim around in water, then they will form a membrane. Once you have a membrane, suddenly you can design an outside and an inside. You'll be able to define permeability through the membrane." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION FIRST. "Walter said the problem is not understanding survival of the fittest but understanding arrival of the fittest. How can a system acquire the ability to replicate? You cannot have evolution of a system toward its ability to replicate. Replication is necessary before you can have evolution. Something else has to come into play before you have the first system that can undergo evolution." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn