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BIOLOGICAL INFORMATION. “Although it is notoriously hard to identify precisely what makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, and perhaps the key property.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

REPLICATIVE INFORMATION. “The origin of life can be understood mathematically to be the origin of information that can replicate.” This may be the best definition yet. https://lnkd.in/eQatsFK View in LinkedIn

THE TRANSITION POINT. “Although few are willing to accept a simple self-replicating molecule as living, the assumption is that after a sufficiently long period of Darwinian evolution this humble replicator will eventually be transformed into an entity complex enough that it is indisputably living.” (Think prions for this gnarly one!) https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

SLIEGT OF HAND. “Often the issue of defining life is sidestepped by assuming that if one can build a simple chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, then the rest will follow suit and the problem of life's origin will de facto be solved.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

SHIFTING MIRAGE. “One is therefore left to conclude that the most important features of biological information (i.e. functionality) are decisively non-local, subject to informational control and feedback, so that the dynamical rules will generally change with time in a manner that is both a function of the current state and the history of the organism (suggesting perhaps that even the concept of evolution itself may be in need of revision.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

“THE HEART OF THE ISSUE is that we do not know whether the living state is ‘just’ very complex chemistry, or whether there is something fundamentally distinct about living matter.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

DATA NOT ENOUGH. “A priori, it is not possible to determine which will be functional in a cell based on local structure and sequence information alone.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

VERY UNIQUE. “The chemist George Whitesides, for example, has stated, ‘How remarkable is life? The answer is: very. Those of us who deal in networks of chemical reactions know of nothing like it’.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

INTERNAL MILIEU. “The functionality of expressed RNA and protein sequences is clearly context-dependent—only an exceedingly small subset of these molecules is causally efficacious (i.e. meaningful) in the larger biochemical network of a cell whose functioning is dependent on conditions such as salinity of the cytoplasm, pH, etc. That milieu includes other expressed proteins, RNAs, metabolites and a host of other molecules, the spatial distribution of which is crucial to their individual causal roles.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. “Of the many open questions surrounding how life emerges from non-life, perhaps the most challenging is the vast gulf between complex chemistry and the simplest biology: even the smallest mycoplasma is immeasurably more complex than any chemical reaction network we might engineer in the laboratory with current technology.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn