Comment by Ericson2314

I never like the emphasis on genetics and information in a lot of origin of life stuff. IMO it is too extensional; what is needed is good intensional reasoning.

At the heart of chemical life is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalysis, this is a great intensional definition of the reproductive side. That just leaves the evolutionary side.

What do "genetics" achieve for reproduction. From the autocatalysis point of view, they create a family of "nearby" autocatalytic sets: because different nucleic acid sequences reproduce in much the same way, the conditions needed to propagate one should also propogate another. This in turn makes safer mutations and....Lamarckian inheritance! If you, a microrganism get a good mutation which makes you fit, and then you split, you pass that mutation on.

Genetics are sufficient for the above properties, but are they necessary? Probably not! We can probably find other things which have such a "dense/smooth mutation space" with fewer local maxima traps. Perhaps it is fine to say such things definitionally encode information, but IMO information still comes second, philosophically.