Good article, longish but worth the read.

It is just amazing that while we know the constituents of all earthly matter (made up from the elements of the periodic table) to a high degree of precision we still don't have a definite idea of how they give rise to "Life" (the definition itself is problematic). Molecular systems undergoing chemical processes somehow give rise to "Biology".

As the article says, "Life" needs a "compartment" (i.e. cell) to begin and grow. It must hold 1) a mechanism to store information (for further propagation) 2) a mechanism to generate energy and do work 3) a mechanism to evolve further. variations.

You start with a chemical soup with various elements/molecules/ions in various levels of concentration, provide energy to the system to encourage reactions and see what happens.

Applying "Complex Systems Science" theories tells us that at a certain scale and with right set of conditions a "primordial cell" maybe formed. Note that there might be multiple types of these cells.

Once this happened it started influencing the very chemical reactions in which it could participate using feedback loops i.e. starts exhibiting "functions/behaviours". To understand this part, i found the book Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg which shows how "complex perceived behaviour" can arise from extremely simple rules, useful - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle

Add "survival of the fittest" over time and you get to where we are today.