I highly recommend reading about Ribosomes. They are made up of two pieces that were likely independent at some time. It becomes quite clear that "life" began a

I highly recommend reading about Ribosomes. They are made up of two pieces that were likely independent at some time. It becomes quite clear that "life" began as a machine that all it could do was replicate itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome You can think of RNA as a copy of a section of DNA. They look very much like computer programs except rather than producing code, the Ribosome can read them and translate each codon for an amino acid into its corresponding actual amino acid that it then binds together into a protein. The execution engine is the environment of the cell. All highly probabilistic rather than deterministic. I can't imagine any programmer not finding them completely fascinating.