Eric Smith on the geochemical inevitability of life on earth

For more from Smith, see this co-authored essay “The Origin of Life”:

“As we see it, the early steps on the way to life are an inevitable, incremental result of the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics operating under the conditions that existed on the early Earth, a result that can be understood in terms of known (or at least knowable) laws of nature. As such, the early stages in the emergence of life are no more surprising, no more accidental, than water flowing downhill.”

Seems to me to be a contemporary example of how complexity science is overcoming Whitehead’s fallacy of the bifurcation of nature. Another science is possible.