Addy Pross What Is Life Analysis

Not since German chemist Friedrich Wöhler demonstrated in 1828 that an organic compound, urea, could be synthesized from inorganic precursors, ammonium and cyanic acid (Kinne-Saffran and Kinne, 290), has the line between organic and inorganic or, in this case, biology and chemistry, been blurred as it has been in Addy Pross' book What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology. In it, Pross dispels the traditional belief that life's evolution and origin must be subdivided into a chemical phase followed by a biological one and, instead, argues that, fundamentally, there exists only one process whose description can be in chemical terms of a high-complexity phase preceded by a low-complexity one [Fig. 1].
Furthermore, Pross posits that the three