In laboratories and in print, human beings continue their long effort to understand how life first arose from lifeless matter — a question that sits at the intersection of chemistry, philosophy, and meaning. A recent experiment produced hollow microscopic spheres from simple chemicals and was heralded as a step toward explaining life's origins, but a critic now argues that the distance between a self-assembling droplet and a living cell is not merely technical but categorical. The debate unfolding in Science and Culture Today is less about one experiment than about what counts as explanation,