"... The origin of life has the characteristic that there's something in there as a chemist, I don't understand how you go from a system that's random chemicals to something that becomes, in a sense, a Darwinian set of reactions that are getting more complicated spontaneously. ..."
Interesting. Turing had a go at this in his last paper, "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," [0] ~ http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/turing..... attempted to answer the theoretical explanation of the biological process that defines the shape of an embryonic organism from creation. This process is called "Morphogenesis" This is an important problem because complex organisms appear to be created by some "random" process that organises what appear to be self similar cells. (previously written at ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077817