Month: September 2022

METHODS. “Using text-mining methods across over 30,000 scientific articles, we defend instead a degrees-of-life view and show how these methods can contribute to experimental philosophy of science and concept explication.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

CRITERIA. “Eight major clusters of properties were identified together with their relative relevance for each target entity (two that relate to metabolism and catalysis, one to genetics, one to evolvability, one to structure, and—rather unexpectedly—three that concern interactions with the environment broadly construed).” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

NUANCED QUALIA. “While aligning with intuitions—for instance about viruses being less alive than bacteria—these quantitative results also reveal differential degrees of performance that have so far remained elusive or overlooked.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

A BIT ALIVE. “Taken together, these analyses provide a conceptual “lifeness space” that makes it possible to move away from a categorical construal of life by empirically assessing the relative lifeness of more-or-less alive entities.” Cardinal heresy alert! Prepare the burning stakes! https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

THE TRADITIONAL BRIGHT LINE. “There is, however, an implicit assumption that is often made in conjunction with such claims: the assumption that there exists a strict delineation between life and non-life.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

TRADITIONAL CUT OFFS. “Some have localized the threshold of life” at the level of self-replicating informational polymers, catalytic networks, metabolism, thermodynamic properties, autopoiesis, membrane formation, or the level of entities in some type of hierarchy.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

IGNORING THE DETAILS. “Yet, numerous hard-to-classify entities are now known that challenge our very intuitions about life and non-life.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

OUTLIERS. These “hard-to-classify entities” include smart macromolecules, complex chemical networks, spontaneous crystals, large viruses, streamlined bacteria. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

THE OUTLIERS. “The menagerie of microbiology also includes artificially simplified versions of natural organisms, specific RNA viral particles or viroids, viral agents named satellites, viruses of viruses that go by the name of virophages, autonomous DNA strands or plasmids, prions, and still others.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

LIFE ON A SPECTRUM. “If it turns out that lifeness is gradual, how do the different more-or-less alive entities fare relative to one another?” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn