Bringing Chemistry to Life

Williams and Frasto da Silva describe the long journey from formless inanimate matter to man, while explaining the nature and the logic of the physical-chemical processes involved. They stress the limitations of reductionist analyses of these processes as complexity increases and novel properties emerge in both animate and biological systems. In particular, the authors develop the idea that it was changes in the geochemical environment that allowed evolution of life to occur and that this evolution required successive additions of new message and information code connections, compatible, and cooperative with previously extant systems.