  We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins
research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or
anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad
categories: unlikely (life's origin was a chance event), construction (life's
origin was a stepwise series of synthesis and assembly processes), and
emergence (life was always an amalgam of many parallel processes from which the
living state emerged as a natural outcome of physical driving forces). We
critically examine some of the founding and possibly misleading assumptions in
these categories. Such assumptions need not be detrimental to scientific
progress as long as their limits are respected. We conclude by attempting to
concisely state the most significant enigmas still remaining in the origins
field and suggest routes to solve them.
