Cool article about how mitochondria became symbiotic with archaea to create eukaryotes — the merger that gave us complex cells.

Computation as the thing life was doing from the start — the argument being that information processing isn't something biology invented later, it's what the earliest chemistry was already up to. Two things worth holding onto: first, that the line between "chemistry" and "computation" is mostly one we drew for our own convenience; second, that if we want to understand the beginnings of new nature — synthetic, artificial, whatever we end up calling it — we have to get the beginnings of the old one right first. The origin story constrains the sequel.