Let us recall what the ‘replication first’ scenario actually proposes. It rests on the idea that once some self-replicating entity happened to emerge, it then proceeded to complexify until it became transformed into some minimal life form. The difficulty with that proposal is that the simplest living system is a highly organized far-from-equilibrium system, which needs to constantly consume energy in order to maintain that far-from-equilibrium state. In other words for a replicating molecule to have complexified into a simple living system would have meant that instead of reacting to yield
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