Nothing related to the beginnings of cellular life as we know it. Darwin was quite explicit about this. Darwinian evolution applies to the fossil record. What might has set it all off was beyond Darwinian ken, and he was quite careful to say so quite often, to avoid being embroiled in the abiogenesis debates.
Of course something way different, to which the Darwinian rules do not all apply, was going on before Prokariotes and Thermatoga made their debute. The only people surprised by this are the staunch proponents of the "whirlwind kind build a 747" argument as applied to Prokariotes.--who are, alas, mired hopelessly in last century's active debates on this subject.
Credit where credit is due. You and Nebullis had a discussion maybe a year and a half ago in which some ideas similar to Woese's got bandied about. Among other things, you mentioned that viruses might be linear descendants of the soup rather than evolved from cellulars as more commonly thought.
I said Darwinians not Darwin. What is being pushed now, I believe, is called Neo-Darwinism. Be that as it may, I still say -- what is needed for Darwinian evolution? The answer is, of course, replication with error in order to generate the information needed for an organism to evolve. If the information is generated prior to and without the assistance of replication, what is the necessity of the replication errors for evolution? And this is not abiogenesis specific as it is stated in the article --- and he suggests that cellular evolution progressed in that order, with translation leading the way. . Cellular evolution, I take it, means exactly that.