Meeker's cite led to this summary: http://www2.asa3.org/archive/evolution/199705/0014.html SELF-REPLICATION: Even peptides do it By Stuart A. Kauffman Nature 382 (8 Aug 1996). Do not be too excited -- this "lifeform" is a 32-amino polypeptide which catalyes its formation from 15- and 17-long halves, assumed already present in environment. But we could regard it as meeting Allan Wechsler's notion of "semi-life" and conceive that many interacting systems of this nature could suffice to synthesize themselves from an amino-soup. C.Greathouse claimed he felt it unlikely even a single mutation would leave a lifeform viable. Wrong. Actually, proteins do usually still work if 1 amino is altered. It helps to avoid aminos in the small "active site" and to keep the amino in the same "class" meaning {hydrophobic, hydrophilic} but the latter is usually not necessary if it is only one amino changing. Thinking a bit about really stripping down a bacterium, all we really need are the DNA, transcription machinery, ribosome, and a DNA polymerase, if we optimistically assume aminos and nucleotide triphosphates were available in environment. In all that'd be about 100 genes fitting in about 10000 base pairs. If we claim the "true complexity" of N-amino proteins is not 20^N or 64^N but rather more like 2^N in view of the 2-class approximate view, and if we claim the 100 genes could be permuted in 100! ways and it'd still work, then we get this number of bits: log( 2^3333 / 100! ) / log(2) = 2808 bits. (This also would be about the complexity of 100 interacting peptide systems of the ilk at top.) Which is still far above from the complexity the abiotic universe could be expected to provide by luck. Which is what? If the entire Earth surface 10 meters deep is regarded as a laboratory performing 1 experiment per cubic angstrom per millisecond for 10^9 years, then I get this number of experiments: 2^217. (If there were also 10^20 planet earths out there, then increase this to 2^283.) So to get genesis of life on Earth, we need to reduce the bit count 2808 by a factor of at least 13, but probably reducing it by a factor 25 would be good enough.