To me, this passage epitomizes why I am not convinced by Kauffman's claim that we need new physics: "The question of whether there is a physics of life demands

To me, this passage epitomizes why I am not convinced by Kauffman's claim that we need new physics: "The question of whether there is a physics of life demands that we consider that all examples of life might at their core be part of the same fundamental phenomenon; otherwise, ‘life’ is not an objective property, but a collection of special cases... but conventional approaches to life’s origins — such as the ‘RNA world’ and other genetics-first models — cannot yet be formulated [as something like a physical law]. That is because they make many assumptions on the basis of properties that might be unique to the chemistry of life on Earth, such as that RNA is necessary to life’s origins." Kauffman starts from the position that he wants life to be a unified ontological category, rather than a collection of special cases, but, for the sake of argument, what if it isn't the former? That would not rule out science[1] describing, analyzing and explaining it as the latter - it would just mean that Kauffman's intuitions would be mistaken. Stephen Jay Gould, wearing his historian-of-science hat, wrote several articles about various examples of pre-, proto- and pseudo-scientific world models, each of which tried to fit the diversity of life into a preconceived grand scheme. Linnaeus et. al. took a radically different approach, in which they abandoned (or, at least, de-emphasized) preconceived schemes, and, working from the bottom up, based their taxonomy on a detailed examination of the physiological similarities and differences between organisms. The unifying theory for this taxonomy was found later, in the form of a theory of evolution, and the taxonomy undoubtedly helped develop the theory. So let's put aside dreams of a unified theory, and see if we can understand just the origin of life on earth. If there is a grand theory, this would help find it. [1] I wrote 'science', not 'physics', because I don't think the reduction of biology to physics is often useful. Take theories of evolution, for example: they are not reductionist, and a reduction of the history of life on earth to the underlying physics would not provide a better explanation.