The Emergence of Life in the Light of Evolution

The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry and molecular biology have suggested diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes, metabolism and cellular compartments on the early Earth, but most of these models ignore the relevance of a population-genetics perspective. Here, we argue that origin-of-life research must expand from asking simply how life began to exploring how it evolved from pre-biological systems. Synthesizing evidence from comparative genomics, phylogenetics, biochemistry, and geoscience, we emphasize that the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) was already a complex, ecologically adapted population of cells far removed from the starting point of life, implying a deep, pre-LUCA evolutionary history. We highlight how population genetics, ecology, and synthetic biology can constrain origin-of-life scenarios by making explicit the roles of selection, drift, mutation, horizontal gene transfer, parasites and compartmentalization in shaping early communities. Finally, we outline an evolutionary research agenda spanning proto-metabolic autocatalytic networks, protocells, and the emergence of translation and the transition to DNA genomes, such that qualitative models can be formalized through evolution-driven hypotheses testable with theory and laboratory experiments, including those with synthetic cells.