@futurebird When I was in school, I was obsessed w/ the naive techbro "what compiles DNA?" angle, but when you look at how DNA works, it's all just "dead" chemicals in a perpetual reaction, with molecules separating and combining with others based on the properties of their constituent atoms over time.
It seems to be all structure, down to the chemical level! It doesn't really seem like a stretch at all that the right chemicals added in the right order would start crawling around. 😌