Just how far back into our evolutionary history can we extend the ideas of natural selection which were propounded by Charles Darwin in "The Origins of the Species?" Do they apply only to organisms with complex biochemistry and recognizable behaviour?. In this book, already influential in its German language edition, the Nobel Prize winning scientist Manfred Eigen takes Darwin's ideas and applies them to molecules. The result is a fresh insight into the origins of life. The laws of physics have taught us the fundamental importance of "chance"; the laws of chemistry that, if certain pre-requisites are fulfilled, then subsequent events can be predicted precisely. Eigen draws together these fundamental ideas and shows us that life on Earth is the inevitable result of certain chance events that took place in the unique history of our planet. The book is in three parts. The first ten chapters, which form the main text, are introduced by quotations from Thomas Mann's novel "The Magic Mountain". This book is deeply concerned with ideas that Eigen is able to justify scientifically but which were, in 1924, the product of an extraordinarily prescient intellect. Here, as a counterpoint to the scientific text, they challenge us to wonder. In the second part, important biological ideas are presented as the themes of 15 "vignettes" which can be read separately or as elaborations of the subject matter of the main text. These vignettes are illustrated with colour diagrams. The final section contains a summary of the salient points of the history of molecular biology and a glossary of all the technical terms used throughout the book.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 "What was life?" - theme and variations: life is historical reality; can the historical origin of life be reconstructed?; complexity as a physical problem; how does information arise?; life is a dynamic state of matter organized by information; is there a principle of order in biological systems?; evolution means the optimization of functional efficiency; what are the natural prerequisites for the origin of life?; the ladder of organizational levels; unceasing creation. Part 2 Vignettes from molecular biology: sequence comparison - statistical geometry, examples; how old are the first life forms?; nucleic acids as information stores - the transition from chemistry to biology; structural forms of the nucleic acids; the proteins - molecular purveyors of cellular function; instruction - copying, reading and translation; the genetic code; quasi-species - the cloning of mutant distributions, the structure of mutant distributions; experiments in evolution; sequence space; viral infection; hypercycles and comparements; recombinant DBA. Part 3 Resume: Darwin is dead - long live Darwin!