For these and other reasons, serious origin-of-life researchers now consider “chance” an inadequate explanation for the origin of biological information.21 Nobel laureate Christian de Duve, a leading origin-of-life biochemist until his death in 2013, categorically rejected the chance hypothesis precisely because he judged the necessary fortuitous convergence of events implausible in the extreme.22 In a memorable passage in his 1995 article “The Beginnings of Life on Earth,” de Duve made explicit the logic by which he rejected the chance hypothesis.
