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Explore the fundamental question of how life emerged from Earth's molecular soup 4 billion years ago through a physics-based approach in this colloquium lecture by Ken Dill from Stony Brook University. Examine three critical problems in origins of life research: identifying the autocatalytic dynamics that served as evolution's "flywheel" for selecting materials, understanding how sequence-structure-function relationships arose from random polymers through statistical mechanics, and defining what constituted "fitness" before biology existed. Discover new theoretical frameworks, simulations, and experimental evidence demonstrating how short random proteins could have bootstrapped their way toward biological complexity, offering fresh insights into one of science's most enduring mysteries beyond traditional RNA-first or protein-first hypotheses.
