The prebiotic or abiotic world was not utter chaos, a random confetti of atoms in motion. In particular there were cycles, at many spatio-temporal scales: seasons, night and day, tides, the water cycle, and thousands of chemical cycles discoverable at the atomic and molecular level. Think of cycles as “do-loops” in algorithms, actions that return to a starting point after “accomplishing” something—accumulating something, or moving something, or sorting something, for instance—and then repeating (and repeating and repeating), gradually changing the conditions in the world and thus raising the
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