Featuring Dr. Eric Smith, professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo and the Santa Fe Institute.

For most of the 20th century, complex biological views of evolution have been central to the way scientists think about the origin of life.

But progress over the past 40 years in such fields as ocean exploration, microbiology, and planetary science has come together to suggest that life's origin may have been built on a core chemical blueprint.

Dr. Smith argues that we need a new understanding of the nature of life, in which the dominant, Darwinian view of a “struggle for existence” comes second, and life at its core came about as a necessary layer of our maturing planet.

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