ONE DEFINITION: life is information that can reproduce and evolve. Forget independence, metabolism and death. An amalgam from various sources. View in LinkedIn
MAUREEN O’MALLY, the School of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. Her previous positions: the University of Sydney; a senior research fellow at Egenis, the University of Exeter; Ford Doolittle’s evolutionary microbiology lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She did her PhD on evolutionary explanations in the social sciences and humanities at the Universities of Edinburgh and Sussex. https://lnkd.in/dbvHfnh View in LinkedIn
MORE TRAPS. “Duplication is not the same as life. Complex chemicals are capable of duplication. Amino acids and protein are not alive, but they duplicate and are a requirement for replication. Proto-life catalyzes and carries information required for its own existence.” https://lnkd.in/dSqra5e MORE TRAPS. “Duplication is not the same as life. Complex chemicals are capable of duplication. Amino acids and protein are not alive, but they duplicate and are a requirement for replication. Proto-life catalyzes and carries information required for its own existence.”https://lnkd.in/dSqra5e View in LinkedIn
FRAGMENT FROM NATURE highlights a deeply enlightened and timely paper by John Dupré and Maureen A. O’Malley called ‘Life at the Intersection of Lineage and Metabolism’. It discusses the unconventional idea of living ecosystems and chemicals as a continuum of structured collaborative entities. This is sure to offend some luddite biologists. View in LinkedIn
NON-LIVING IMMORTAL. “Birth and death is one of the characteristics of living thing, DNA appeared in the living and it is not having birth point to have death point. So, DNA is non-living because it never dies.” https://lnkd.in/dMinrW7 View in LinkedIn
TWISTED LOGIC. “The image that took shape in the back of my mind was that DNA was a kind of seed, and seeds, I also thought falsely, are of course alive. But no, seeds are not fully alive either. They are not active and, until they germinate, they don’t change or develop.” https://lnkd.in/dnze6ce View in LinkedIn
DEFINITIONAL TRAP. “DNA is non-living because it cannot maintain homeostasis on its own. And it does not have a metabolism of its own.” https://lnkd.in/dMinrW7 View in LinkedIn
LOTS OF STORAGE. “The researchers totted up the number of organisms in the world, from the tiniest virus to the biggest whale, multiplied this by the total number of their cells containing at least once DNA molecule and converted this figure into an estimated weight – about 50bn tonnes of genetic material.” https://lnkd.in/dKU5Dr8 View in LinkedIn
SO ENDS this provocative and thoughtful discussion about where life starts and ends, and the problems of defining life. When the Little Green Men come to Earth and ask us what we define as life, collectively, we will score a D(-) as a backward student in the Cosmos. View in LinkedIn
DEFINITIONAL ISSUES. “Thinking about viruses and their relegation to the realms of non-living and non-organismal entities necessitates a consideration of whether organism and living entity are identical categories, and whether a minimal account of life has to begin with cells.” https://lnkd.in/dVyX2pV View in LinkedIn