Okay, this was admittedly piling up a lot of ifs on top of ifs. But to Kauffman, this autocatalytic set story was far and away the most plausible explanation for the origin of life that he had ever heard. If it were true, it meant the origin of life didn’t have to wait for some ridiculously improbable event to produce a set of enormously complicated molecules; it meant that life could indeed have bootstrapped its way into existence from very simple molecules. And it meant that life had not been just a random accident, but was part of nature’s incessant compulsion for self-organization.
