ABSTRACT
In all my reading about evolutionary theory, perhaps my favourite anecdote is that about Orgel’s Second Law. Leslie Orgel was an eminent British chemist-turned-evolutionarybiologist who was among the fi rst people to see Watson and Crick’s double helix model and who later went on to do important work on the origins of life. By all accounts, he was also a man with a wry sense of humour. When challenged that there was insuffi - cient evidence that evolution could be responsible for the complexity of life, apparently he responded with the pithy retort: ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are,’ a phrase that has entered the folklore of evolutionary scientists and is now known, slightly fl ippantly, as Orgel’s Second Law. Flippant or not, Orgel’s intent was surely to remind us that billions of years of variation, selection and amplifi cation by untold numbers of replicators and interactors is far more likely to fi nd solutions to the problems of survival than is our limited human imagination.
