Reaction: Systematic Hope for Life’s Origins

Abstract

Niles Lehman received his BS in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1984 and his PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1990. He is currently a professor of chemistry at Portland State University and is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Molecular Evolution . His research focuses on the evolutionary processes leading from chemistry to biology, especially the ability of informational polymers such as RNA to create cooperative networks.