The lead author, Blaise Agüera, of the paper this is implementing, has some interesting ideas around the origin and nature of life. There's an interview of him

The lead author, Blaise Agüera, of the paper this is implementing, has some interesting ideas around the origin and nature of life. There's an interview of him on MLST here, well worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMSEqJ_4EBk&t=945s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMSEqJ_4EBk&t=945s It's obvious that replicators in this experiment are going to dominate if/when they appear, but not so obvious that they will emerge in the first place. I suppose the programs, reliant on their sequential structure, might be regarded as a parallel to nucleic acid sequences in the emergence of early life, but the random origins are also comparable to Stuart Kauffman's "At home in the universe" proto-metabolism where varied individual chemical reactions combine to create a whole capable of collective self-replication.