GEORGE: I've not been here for a while, but thought this might be of interest:-http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27827/-It's a general mathematical approach to emergence.-Thank you, George. It's a pleasure to know that you're still delving and keeping us in mind. In your absence, we've continued to do our own delving, and some of the ideas in this article are not a million miles away from the "intelligent cell" proposal. For instance:
 
"These units can be complex entities in themselves. "Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to think, for example, of the collection of bacterial species in your gut (several hundreds of them) as one big autocatalytic set," say Kauffman and co."-However, in your heading and in the article, you and Kauffman & Co link the theory to abiogenesis (sometimes called autogenesis ... the theory that life arose spontaneously from non-living matter):-"Could it be that the same idea--the general theory of autocatalytic sets--can help explain the origin of life [...]?"-I'm not a mathematician or chemist, but I do know that the prefix "auto-" (from the Greek autos = self) just means by oneself, independent, directed from within...I doubt if even the most fundamental of theists would believe that God is personally directing every bacterium in every gut. The question we're constantly asking is not whether the hugely complex processes that govern digestion, reproduction, breathing, the senses, movement, self-healing etc. work independently of outside guidance (they obviously do), but whether the original mechanism that gave rise to all of these "autocatalytic sets" could have come into existence by itself/independently/directed from within. Kauffman and Co's question is suitably tentative, but I can't see even a germ of an explanation. And so as usual the theist will answer no (though the same question has to apply to a universal intelligence), the atheist will answer yes, and the rest of us will stay on our fence. Nothing has changed in your absence, George!