Month: September 2022

LANGUAGE IS VAGUE. "I argue that it is a mistake to try to define 'life'. Such efforts reflect fundamental misunderstandings about the nature and power of definitions. I don't think that defining "life" is a very useful activity for scientists to pursue since it is not going to tell us what we really want to know, which is "what is life." A scientific theory of life (which is not the same as a definition of life) would be able to answer these questions in a satisfying way." https://lnkd.in/eNX5qhp View in LinkedIn

PLANETARY LIFE. "Life arising more than once from nonliving materials could occur elsewhere than Earth, but it could also have occurred on Earth. It is possible that extraterrestrial life exists and that all life nonetheless has a common ancestor. Scientists now believe that microbes can survive interplanetary journeys ensconced in meteors produced by asteroid impacts on planetary bodies containing life." https://lnkd.in/eNX5qhp View in LinkedIn

NEED A GENERAL THEORY. "We use insights from philosophical investigations into language to argue that defining 'life' currently poses a dilemma analogous to that faced by those hoping to define 'water' before the existence of molecular theory. In the absence of an analogous theory of the nature of living systems, interminable controversy over the definition of life is inescapable." https://lnkd.in/eNX5qhp View in LinkedIn

ERWIN SHRODINGER'S 1944 definition of life: that which "avoids the decay into equilibrium." A reference to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, where entropy always increases, or the continual spreading of disorder. Forget carbon, forget water. These are location effects. And forget definitions beyond this gnarly beauty. Go forth and avoid decay. https://lnkd.in/ebMm7aF View in LinkedIn

GO FORTH AND REPRODUCE VARIOUSLY. "A clever scientist found 123 definitions for 'Life' and compared them. He found out that most of them said something about Reproduction and Evolution or Variation, so he says "Life is Self-Reproduction with Variations." https://lnkd.in/e3zZDuE View in LinkedIn

MODERN DEFINITION OF LIFE. "Any entity that has the ability to store and exchange information autonomously." https://lnkd.in/eyhNP82 View in LinkedIn

LIFE AS COLLABORATIVE. "Life, according to our analysis, occurs at the intersection of lineage formation and (typically collaborative) involvement in metabolism. Entities that are problem cases, such as viruses, can be understood as alive when actively collaborating. When not collaborating, they have at most a potential for life." https://lnkd.in/e7VVjkg View in LinkedIn

INTERSECTING LIVES. "Countless non-cellular entities have individual life-histories, which they achieve through contributing to the lives and life-histories of the larger entities in which they collaborate, and this collaboration constitutes their claim to life." https://lnkd.in/e7VVjkg View in LinkedIn

DNA CHAUVANISM. Stanley Miller, Carl Sagan and 18 notable other scientists debate the origin of life. A remarkable dialogue. https://lnkd.in/e6N687q View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. The first Grey Zone characters are prions, a "quasi-species". These things are very perplexing. They are just misfolded normal cellular proteins ( chains of amino acids) that have the ability to mutate and evolve. They are infectious proteins that can induce normal proteins to become infectious by adopting their misfolded shape, and thus are self-propagating. Curious, to say the least. A serious head-job. View in LinkedIn