Alexander Graham Cairns-Smith is an organic chemist and molecular biologist at the University of Glasgow. The book popularized a hypothesis he began to develop in the mid-1960s—that self-replication of clay crystals in solution might provide a simple intermediate step between biologically inert matter and organic life. He inspired other ideas about chemical evolution, including the Miller–Urey experiment and the RNA World, all of which are hypotheses that have greatly helped in explaining the origin of life.
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