There is what Koonin calls ‘staggering complexity inherent even in the minimally functional translation system’, leading to ‘the dramatic paradox of the origin of life’: in order to attain the minimal complexity required for a biological system to get on the Darwin-Eigen spiral, a system of a far greater complexity appears to be required. How such a system could evolve, is a puzzle that defeats conventional evolutionary thinking, all of which is about biological systems moving along the spiral
