and does this mean we can recreate this process to manipulate life into whatever we want?
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Random chance.
The idea is that the primordial soup that was on Earth contained a lot of amino acids (the building blocks of life) and eventually enough stuff randomly came together to form a strand of RNA that coded for a protein. It assembled the amino acids into a protein that could then construct another strand of RNA. This self replicating strand of RNA would have been the first lifeform. Eventually, it mutated enough that several strands of RNA coded for several proteins that could come together and form a cell. At some point, the RNA assembling proteins would have mutated and created DNA, which was much better at its job. Over billions and billions of generations, it would have mutated enough to look something like cells we know today. Once the primordial soup was running low on amino acids, one of these cells would have mutated the ability to get energy from light. These would be the first cyanobacteria. At one point, some form of amoeba ate another cell and stored all of its DNA inside of it, giving us the first nucleus. At another point, some form of amoeba at another cell, but instead of digesting it, the eaten cell started producing energy for the amoeba, creating the first mitochondria. Eventually, cells started to work together to make the first multicellular lifeforms, and that brings us to the Cambrian explosion. And that’s about the first 3 billion years of life on Earth summarized.
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