Not <i>origin of life</i> but <i>evolution in microbes</i>

Abstract

Our present lack of knowledge of other life forms makes it difficult to hypothesize about, and even harder to design experiments to reproduce the conditions and results of the first emergence of life in the universe. Even if we restrict our scope to the Earth, limiting our research possibilities to carbon-based life forms and Earthlike planetary conditions, the gap between prokaryotic cellular organization and the earliest possible self-maintaining systems is so large that we currently cannot extrapolate backwards to make a logical bridge between them.