Welcome to the 38th issue of the SHAPE Journal.

This latest edition started as a reaction to an article in New Scientist (3008) on Eukaryotic and Prokaryotic cells in the development of life, but soon drew in the prior work by this theorist on the Origin of Life itself.

It was worth stressing that either working downwards from living entities, or working upwards from non-living entities, would both fail to explain this crucial event, which rather than being a mere incremental development in the evolution of matter, was certainly a kind of revolution, and must have occurred in what we now term an Emergent Event. Thus this collection of papers became a kind of review of the ideas vital to a solution to the most important problem in Science: why does life exist at all?

“What?” I hear you say, “What could possibly be a Marxist view of the Origin of Life!?”

Well, it is the only approach capable of solving the problem, in my view - Marxism from the outset, was, and still is, a philosophy of change. Not merely a political stance, as some seem to think, but a method of understanding the way things

Jim Schofield
APR 2015