Demystifying Biology: Did Life Begin as a Complex System?

Paul Lauterbur, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Chemistry, UIUC

The Universe is constantly mixing and unmixing at all levels, on all scales of time and pace. At the molecular level, molecules can form spontaneous reversible specific binding and catalytic sites in rigid solids. These sites, it is calculated, may support general replication reactions, suggesting a hypothetical reductionist path to biological organization that does not involve impossibly improbable events, emergent properties, or deities, and that may be achievable in the laboratory.