Seven Clues to the Origin of Life : A Scientific Detective Story (Abridged ed)

Seven Clues to the Origin of Life is about how life may have arisen on Earth.

The book is written and the tape read by Cairns-Smith as a detective story.

It relies on the methods of Sherlock Holmes - particularly Holmes' principle that one should always use the most paradoxical features of a case to crack it. The origin of life is full of paradoxical difficulties, as well as clues and red herrings, but all of these, when disentangled, lead to a new view of how life began. This book answers the fundamental question: what kind of stuff was it that our ultimate ancestors were made of? 'A summary of the best evolutionary thinking ...in which the important issues are addressed pertinently.' Nature