Hobbes established that logic and digital computation share common foundations, suggesting a basis in common with mind. Biology and technology evidence parallel tendencies toward collective. This evolutionary process, whereby the most economical or meaningful representation wins, leads to a hierarchy of languages, encoding meaning on levels that transcend comprehension by the system's individual components - whether genes, insects, microprocessors, or human minds. In the same manner, I teach that molecular memory is the information that leads to life and mind. Either life began only once, with the functions of replication and metabolism already present in rudimentary form and linked together from the beginning, or life began twice, with two separate kinds of creatures, one kind capable of metabolism without exact replication, the other kind capable of replication without metabolism.
Dual functions suggest dual structures and dual origins.
Life, however, arrives at distinctions by increments and rarely erases its steps. Thus, the one origin of cellular life simultaneously provided cellular structure capable of exhibiting all of the attributes of life. I will close this book review by leaving out the remainder of the growth of computer science.