Tim Gowers has some very interesting ideas for an open science project to come up with a simple theoretical model where self-replication organisms are likely to spontaneously arise. In this post he tries to formulate a question or questions such a project could feasibly attack, and discusses what would count as a success. - Michael Nielsen

I can't do justice to this post here in this short space - the whole post and the discussion thread that follows are both full of interesting ideas - but I think it'd be very interesting to get input from chemists and biologists. The spirit of the proposed project has something of the flavour of the Urey-Miller experiment. - Michael Nielsen