Ultimately, understanding life will require us to understand those special properties, both in themselves and how they came about. Some, as we will see, may be understood in Darwinian terms, though the debate about those explanations continues. Others, however, cannot be understood that way, and their very essence continues to trouble us. They certainly troubled the great physicists of the twentieth century, amongst them Bohr, Schrödinger, and Wigner, since several of life’s characteristics appear to undermine the most basic tenets of modern science.
