I just got Jean-François Gariépy's book on
The Revolutionary Phenotype. I think his theory makes more sense than most of this stuff, and wasn't done at government expense. (The book opens with a short Letter to the Reader in which he explains that he left academic biology because it was mostly just people writing grant proposals and meaningless publish-or-perish papers.)
In a nutshell, his theory is: protein world -> RNA world -> DNA world -> AI world. The latter will be our own doing—and our undoing.
protein world -> RNA world -> DNA world -> AI world
AI world is vastly slower and less complex than even protein world. The complexity of replicating protein folding is far beyond current computing capabilities and will be for probably a couple of decades.