It's funny the author does not go into Karl Friston's Markov Blanket concept in regards to Life
https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Life%20as%20we%20know%20...
His paper here presents a heuristic proof (and simulations of a primordial soup) suggesting that life—or biological self-organization—is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket