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A study published in July 2025 examined one of science's biggest unanswered questions: how life first emerged from non-living matter on early Earth. The research, led by Robert G. Endres of Imperial College London, used mathematics to examine how difficult it would have been for the first living system, known as a protocell, to form before Darwinian evolution began.
The origin of life remained an open question in physics and chemistry. Scientists had already studied how simple molecules might have formed under early Earth conditions, but this study focused on a different challenge: how those molecules could have become organized into a functioning living system.
To investigate this, Endres developed a mathematical framework based on information theory and algorithmic complexity. Information theory is a branch of mathematics that studies how information is stored, measured and organized. In this study, it was used to estimate how much meaningful information a biological system would have needed to function. Algorithmic complexity measures how much information or how many instructions are required to describe or recreate something. More complex systems require more detailed organization.
