Month: September 2022

LIFE TRANSITIONS. The borderline cases are where life transitions become most interesting, and troubling to those who want a tidy playbook. Viruses, seeds, frozen sperm, probiotic soup, mobile genetic elements and even computer code. And, as a consequence, artificial intelligence. One of our most compelling topics today. View in LinkedIn

TIME AND EXTENT. "If life is viewed as supple adaptation, then the most important life/non-life distinction involves a continuum because the activity of supple adaptability itself comes in degrees. Different systems can exhibit supple adaptation to different degrees, and a given system’s level of supple adaptation can fluctuate over time." https://lnkd.in/da-Njua View in LinkedIn

MATERIAL OR FORM? "Does the essence of life concern the material out of which something is composed or the form in which that material is arranged? If the latter, is that form static or is it a process? If the latter, is that process computational? Is the property of being alive a functional property? Is it realizable in an indefinitely long list of different material substrata? Could a computer simulation of a living process ever be a realization of life, i.e., literally be alive?" https://lnkd.in/da-Njua View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE. "This continuum from non-life to life is an example of emergence?" https://lnkd.in/dYRg2SW View in LinkedIn

BIOLOGISTS debate whether viruses are alive, and have done so for a long period of time. With equal lack of resolution, they engage in endless debates about the definitions of life. Both topics are capable of making rational people apoplectic. View in LinkedIn

NON-INTUITIVE. "For about 100 years, the scientific community has repeatedly changed its collective mind over what viruses are. First seen as poisons, then as life-forms, then biological chemicals, viruses today are thought of as being in a gray area between living and nonliving: they cannot replicate on their own but can do so in truly living cells and can also affect the behavior of their hosts profoundly." https://lnkd.in/dHuVTgq View in LinkedIn

CRYSTALIZED VIRUS. "Their demotion to inert chemicals came after 1935, when Wendell M. Stanley and his colleagues, at what is now the Rockefeller University in New York City, crystallized a virus— tobacco mosaic virus—for the first time." https://lnkd.in/dHuVTgq View in LinkedIn

BAG OF TRICKS. "Biologists long favored the view that viruses were mere boxes of chemicals." https://lnkd.in/dHuVTgq View in LinkedIn

MODERN MALADY. "If a virus be neither organism nor molecule, what is its nature? What is a virus? It is a malady of our time that words are often deprived of their meaning." https://lnkd.in/dDiKsry View in LinkedIn

VIRUSES "parasitize essentially all biomolecular aspects of life. That is, they depend on the host cell for the raw materials and energy necessary for nucleic acid synthesis, protein synthesis, processing and transport, and all other biochemical activities that allow the virus to multiply and spread." https://lnkd.in/dHuVTgq View in LinkedIn