How far along do these books make it in the evolutionary process? I've been reading up on the mechanisms behind how cancer works (and how we try to fight it) recently, and it has unveiled a level of complexity and specificity that I had no idea existed. It almost doesn't compute how these systems have evolved through pure chance in the time-frames that we are talking about.
Actually that would help for me. One of the early walls in the evolutionary curve would appear to be DNA replication. The level of complexity in the associated protein/enzyme machinery is one of those 'weird things' to me that I don't really understand. Will take a look, thank you.
The Vital question doesn't delve into the DNA replication part of it as far as I remember. It focuses more on the initial conditions needed for the living cell machinery to bootstrap, and the physical constraints that are necessary or need to be overcome to achieve life, and kind of glosses over the genetics part. I myself wondered about this after reading the book, and the best resource I could find was this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6360/
It goes into a lot of detail about how complex life arose through the "deadly rise" of 'eukaryotes'. (All complex life forms, "including plants, animals, fungi, algae and protists such as the amoeba, are made of eukaryotic cells.)
So the timeframe is indeed "billions of years", as noted below.
