““The actual structure of the life we know is deeply and pervasively anchored in the particularities of the periodic table. If one wishes to propose an abstraction of 'life' away from its chemical substrate, one should first consider seriously the depth of this embedding, and should ask, if the chemical particulars were removed, how much of the structure we think of as living would remain to be abstracted. This embedding, of course, is also the basis for belief that the emergence of life was heavily scaffolded in the structure of physical laws, and thus not an arbitrary and vastly improbable discovery.””
