I read some of those ideas years ago, , and thought it was thrilling. Over recent years I don't really see the need for a kind of genetic intermediar… - Nick Lane

What does life do then? ...it seems reasonable that the earliest forms of life were ic... [i.e.,] they grew from gases... found in normal geological environments through an energy flux which is equivalent to cells which we see today, which is to say, what all life does today. There's a very simple phrase from Mike Russell... "hydrogenate CO₂"... [i.e.,] add onto to make organic molecules. That is the structure of in cells, and different cells can get hydrogen from all kinds places. They can strip it out of water. They can get it from , but it also comes bubbling out of the ground as hydrogen gas, and that seems to be the simplest form of life imaginable as... life on earth. It's reacting hydrogen and CO₂, and they don't react easily. The way that cells make them react... is to effectively use an electrical charge on a ... [T]here are environments like deep sea s that provide... for free with an equivalent electrical charge across a barrier, and I think... that's the way to see the question.

[Why a cell vs a gene or partial gene?] There's been plenty of work done on RNA replicators and they have a tendency to become smaller and simpler and effectively better able to make copies of themselves with whatever you provide them in the environment, and they end up with a thing called , which is basically the binding sequence of the which allows it to furiously replicate away. ...If you're providing in the environmwent an RNA polymerase and an infinite supply of s then... they become simpler and simpler, and faster and faster at copying. ...The trouble is there isn't ever going to be an environment that's providing that for you except in a cellular context... If you're selecting at the level of genetic replication, the replicators that are better able to make copies of themselves fast are those which are, in effect, the most selfish and the least likely to cooperate to try and convert the environment into .

So if you think of it from a protocell point of view, the selfish replicators which are the best at making copies of themselves are necessarily those that are best able to make the entire protocell replicate itself.