The Santa Fe Institute presents a new, free online course – Origins of Life lead by Sarah Maurer and Chris Kempes and funded by the National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network for Exploration of Life’s Origins.

The course aims to push the field of origins of life research forward by bringing new and synthetic thinking to the question of how life emerged from an abiotic world.

Enroll now at: Origins.ComplexityExplorer.org

Instruction begins June 14, 2019



The Course Promotional Video is also available here.

The course is composed of six modules:

Introduction. Designed to give students an overview of the content and motivate the students by describing interesting lines of inquiry

Chemical origins. An overview of the chemicals that likely lead to life, and the environments that shaped them here on Earth, but also within the solar system.

Chemical Commonalities. What do living things have in common and how can we use these similarities to understand first life.

Early Life. Some ideas of what the earliest forms of life may have look liked.

Evolution. How did life change from its first stages to the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and into what we see today.

Astrobiology & General Theories of Life. Thoughts on how life could originate and evolve elsewhere.