title: The origin of life: a problem of history, chemistry, and evolution.
abstract: The origin of life is a field full of controversies, not only because of our vague understanding concerning the relevant issues, but also, perhaps more often, owing to our dim conceptual framework throughout the whole field. To improve this situation, an in-depth conceptual dissection is presented here. It is elucidated that, at its core, the origin of life has three aspects. The facts involved in the process are taken as the historical aspect, which is destined to be uncertain and often irrelevant to debate regarding details. The rules involved include two distinct aspects: chemical mechanisms operated in the whole process, while evolutionary mechanisms joined in only after the emergence of the first Darwinian entities - and then accounted for the subsequent buildup of complexity (this cannot be explained solely by natural selection). Basically, we can ask about the possibility of any assumed event in the origin of life: 'Is it evolutionarily plausible, chemically feasible, and historically likely?' Clues from any of the three aspects may be quite valuable in directing our explorations on the other two. This conceptual dissection provides a clearer context for the field, which may even be more useful than any sort of specific research.
authors.affiliation: College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, P. R. China. mwt@whu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Wentao
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ma
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D000069497:Origin of Life
keywords: Darwinian entity; Essence of life; Natural selection; Prebiotic evolution; RNA World