If those molecules bump together and form something more complex, on and on, Cronin said, “that is the selection equivalent of gravity. And that process of complexity generates everything we have in the universe that’s associated with life.”

All the same, Berzelius added a fruitful notion. Rather than postulate some “vital force”—“a word to which we can affix no idea”—we should recognize that “this power to live belongs not to the constituent parts of our bodies, nor does it belong to them as an instrument, neither is it a simple power; but the result of the mutual operation of the ins

Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics. This was not