Steps Towards Life: A Perspective on Evolution

This is a short book, but full of facts and insights. Eigen presents his ideas about the origin of life, i.e. how "inorganic" molecules started to replicate and fill the earth. The book is full of ingenious new concepts, backed in almost every case by biochemical experimental results (this is something Stuart Kauffman seldoms does: At Home in the Universe is about the same chemical/biochemical processes, but only about consepts, no data to back the ideas). Eigen's book is concise, even too terse. Some knowledge of (bio)chemistry is absolutely required, as the arguments in the book are not just hand waving but show equations and sequences (for those with more verbal approach to evolution, Claus Emmeche book "The Garden in the Machine" gives a good discussion on the relationship between the real life and the artificial model systems used to study it.)