Once again, it is time to start another incredibly inflammatory topic: The origin of life! If we exclude all the theological origin stories, there are more than enough hypotheses as to keep us busy. In saying that, why even bother to address the origin of life? 

While the complexity of the many different species on the planet appears endless, the core functionality of life is essentially the same across the board. We all have similar requirements for survival but differ in our methods of acquiring them. Without getting too bogged down in reductionist thinking, we should be able to identify the causes of human fear and desire via understanding the motivational drivers of our last common ancestors. If you were paying attention during Part I or Part II, you would realize that damn near all of our decisions rest on moving away from potentially dangerous stimuli or moving towards things that provide perceived value. 

With that in mind, let’s start our journey with the proposed origin of the initiator of life and the first instance of life itself. As we will soon see, this line becomes blurry quite quickly and ends up with us needing to readdress how special life really is. Afterwards, we’ll look at the process of biological change, our partners in energetic crime, and then break down terminology to make remembering these ideas easier. Then we should be ready to look at the biosphere, and finally, the origin of sapiens.