Professors' projects aiming to pin down life's origin

As Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese describe it, we have an understanding of the framework for the origins of life on Earth.

At first, pieces of the puzzle interacted with their environment in the primordial soup and with each other. They actively swapped materials, innovations and tools, testing different combinations until a "tipping point" was reached and new, optimized forms emerged, at which point the process jumped to a higher level.

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