New physics needed to probe the origins of life

A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life Stuart A. Kauffman Oxford University Press (2019)

Among the great scientific puzzles of our time is how life emerged from inorganic matter. In the 1980s and 1990s, Kauffman — a complex-systems researcher — developed a highly influential theory for life’s origins, based on molecules that reproduce only collectively, called autocatalytic sets. But conventional approaches to life’s origins — such as the ‘RNA world’ and other genetics-first models — cannot yet be formulated in this way.

Source: www.nature.com