The panel on the origin of the first life featured another similarly dramatic revelation. One of the leading origin-of-life researchers in attendance, biophysicist Dean Kenyon (Fig. 1.3), announced that he had repudiated his own cutting-edge evolutionary theory of life’s origin. Kenyon’s theory—developed in a bestselling advanced textbook titled Biochemical Predestination—articulated what was then arguably the most plausible evolutionary account of how a living cell might have “self-organized” from simpler chemicals in a “prebiotic soup.”
