Jack Szostak: The Origin of Life: Not as Hard as it Looks?

Lecture by Dr Jack Szostak, 2009 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine and member of the Molecular Frontiers Scientific Advisory Board, at the Molecular Frontiers Symposium "On Human Origins and the Future of Humanity", at Lund University April 18-19, 2024. The symposium was co-organized with Lund University and the Royal Physiographic Society of Lund.
ABSTRACT:
The combined efforts of laboratories around the world have begun to converge on a reasonable pathway going all the way from planet formation to the beginnings of life itself. Many deeply embedded preconceptions have had to be overcome and discarded in order to enable progress. I will explain how overcoming these conceptual barriers has enabled fresh thinking into how the molecules of life were synthesized on the early Earth and then assembled into the first living cells. Once the ability of life to evolve in a Darwinian sense had become firmly established, life was free to adapt, diversify, and flourish, eventually giving rise to all the varieties of life we see around us today.

[@peterz53]

Why is life elsewhere consigned to zero probability or "we don't know?" Why doesn't one example, and an example tied to physical processes which exist elsewhere, count for something even if we can't properly apply statistics.