Seven Clues to the Origin of Life is about how life may have arisen on Earth. The book is written and the tape read by Cairns-Smith as a detective story. It relies on the methods of Sherlock Holmes - particularly Holmes' principle that one should always use the most paradoxical features of a case to crack it. The origin of life is full of paradoxical difficulties, as well as clues and red herrings, but all of these, when disentangled, lead to a new view of how life began. This book answers the fundamental question: what kind of stuff was it that our ultimate ancestors were made of?'A summary of the best evolutionary thinking … in which the important issues are addressed pertinently.' Nature