[EdwardCoffin]

Anyone interested in this kind of thing might find Freeman Dyson's paper A Model for the Origin of Life [1] interesting. It's a purely statistical model, dealing with the most abstract properties of the component molecules. The summary from the paper:

Summary. A simple statistical model is constructed, describing the transition from disorder to order in a population of mutually catalytic molecules undergoing random mutations. The consequences of the model are calculated, and its possible relevance to the problem of the origin of life is discussed. The main conclusion of the analysis is that the model allows populations of several thousand molecular units to make the transition from disorder to order with reasonable probability.

I got on to this from the bit of his Web of Stories interview talking about it [2]. I listened to the whole interview recently, and highly recommend it.

[1] https://www.icts.res.in/sites/default/files/LivingMatter2018...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxlYsAzM_8I