Publisher's Synopsis
"Life on Earth arose from rather curious beginnings. Approximately 4.5 billion years ago our planet formed from a complex soup of interstellar material orbiting a relatively average, newborn dwarf star. Within that soup were precursors-complex, carbon-rich molecules with a penchant for self-assembly-which would combine and grow in complexity and versatility. This would lead to complex molecular systems that could self-replicate and in the process, iterate: a recipe for evolution. Eventually organisms would emerge capable of highly complex interactions with the environment. Extracting energy from chemical compounds or the sun, they converted this into a bewildering array of complex biomolecules from which life would continue to evolve. The Earth underwent a dramatic transition from a desolate and barren place, to a world utterly teeming with life. Through these origins, organisms on Earth have a common ancestry and therefore share the sa
