Chance and the origin of life

Abstract

Random chemical reactions in the Earth's primitive hydrosphere could have generated no more than 200 bits of information, whereas the first Darwinian organism must have encoded about a million bits, and therefore could not have arisen by chance. This information gap is bridged by separating reproduction from organism, and postulating a reproductive chemical community that would generate information by proto-Darwinian evolution. The information content of the initial community could have been as low as 160 bits, and its evolution might have led to the first Darwinian cell.