Here's a key paragraph that really walks back a lot of the language in the first half of the article. Here he's just stating physics may be much friendlier to t

Here's a key paragraph that really walks back a lot of the language in the first half of the article. Here he's just stating physics may be much friendlier to the initial conditions for abiogenesis than previously believed: “In the short term, I’m not saying this tells me a lot about what’s going in a biological system, nor even claiming that this is necessarily telling us where life as we know it came from,” he said. Both questions are “a fraught mess” based on “fragmentary evidence,” that, he said, “I am inclined to steer clear of for now.” He is rather suggesting that in the tool kit of the first life- or proto-life-forms, “maybe there’s more that you can get for free, and then you can optimize it using the Darwinian mechanism.”