Other ways of linking informational ideas to general issues in evolutionary theory seem more promising. As John Maynard Smith, Eors Szathmáry, Mark Ridley and Richard Dawkins have emphasized in different ways, inheritance mechanisms that give rise to significant evolutionary outcomes must satisfy some rather special conditions (Dawkins 1995; Jablonka and Szathmáry 1995; Szathmáry and Maynard Smith 1997; Ridley 2000). Maynard Smith and Szathmáry claim, for example, that the inheritance system must be unlimited or “indefinite” in its capacity to produce new combinations, but must also maintain high fidelity of transmission. This fact about the relationship between inheritance systems and biological structure is often thought to reveal one of the most pressing problems in explaining the origins of life. If reproduction depends on the replication of a crucial set of ingredients to kick-start the new generation (whether or not we think of those ingredients as instructions), these ingredients must be replicated accurately. Yet accurate replication apparently depends on complex molecular and intracellular machinery that itself is the result of a long regime of adaptive evolution, and hence on deep lineages of living systems. So how could reproduction have begun? (see Ridley 2000 for a thoughtful discussion).