Manfred Eigen is a German physicist who has conducted numerous experiments in prebiotic evolution to understand the process by which different species of RNA compete and evolve. Like Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman, he is a prominent supporter of the application of complexity theory to origin of life studies. Eigen was awarded, with Ronald Norrish and George Porter, the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for studies of extremely fast chemical reactions.