We will not know what life is at a fundamental level until we can explain how life has emerged on this planet.

In my recent book "The pursuit of complexity" I discuss the question of 'what is life?' and offer an innovative answer in three steps (page 27, page 87 and page 94).

http://the-operator-theory.wikispaces.com/Definition+of+life%2C+the+organism%2C+and+death

I wrote this Feature article in BioScience about new thinking on the origin of life and some of its attendant philosophical questions. It mentions a recent meeting at CERN on the topic. One organizer, Stu Kauffman, said the plan was to create within 20 years autocatalytic sets in liposomes “and their capacity to sense their world, food, or poison, and [to] evolve to respond adaptively.” Interesting...wait a minute...oh no...it's....it's....it's ALI!#(*&$^%$*^@(#@#@&$)!$@!

(token is good only until May 19, 2013)

www.jstor.org/stoken/ucaltoken/unuZF6FAi66pYVuhrfke/full

Жизнь это процесс. Определение жизни может быть разное. Это определение зависит от точки зрения. Посмотрите, пожалуйста,

"Жизнь как явление"

http://gladyshevevolution.wordpress.com/

A number of years ago now John Kendrew of Harvard stated this regarding the debate over whether or not viruses are alive:

“These arguments are only important if one supposes that there is a fundamental distinction between living things and nonliving things, some kind of boundary on

one side or the other of which everything must be placed. Personally I do not think there is any evidence of such a boundary, or any difference in essence between the living and the nonliving, and I think most molecular biologists would share this view.”

A decade later Francois Jacob wrote: "The processes that take place at the microscopic level in the molecules of living beings are completely indistinguishable from those investigated in inert systems by physics and chemistry...In fact, since the appearance of thermodynamics, the operational value of the concept of life has continually dwindled, and its power of abstraction declined. Biologists no longer study life today."

Is it safe to assume that many biologists are no longer thinking this way, or is this discussion on RG an anomaly?

Bill,

There is an obvious distinction between the living and the inanimate. But the most obvious things are always the most difficult to understand. A lot of objectives distinctions between the living and the inanimate have been proposed over the years.

Louis,

Would it be safe to say that you believe there is "a fundamental distinction between living things and nonliving things" and that you believe there is some "operational value to the concept of life" contra Kendra and Jacob?

If so, what distinctions would you make in this area, and what changes do you believe have taken place since those men wrote those things?

It seems a sign of intellectual poverty when biologists say they see no point in making distinctions between living and non-living systems. I was looking in the direction of marine biology for my career at the time, and I observed what I thought was philosophical bankruptcy on the part of some of the better know philosophers of science. I found it tragic that they wrote as they did when they did. I concluded that their discipline was in need of a paradigm shift such as Einstein brought to the field of Physics, and that I wasn't likely to be the one to usher in such a change. So, although I love the life sciences, I took a different path.

Bill,

Howard Pattee (who has a RG profile) has written extensively on the relation between the origin of life and the origin of symbol or language (biosemiotic).

http://binghamton.academia.edu/HowardPattee

The amount of information in living systems compare with the amount of information in all other type of natural systems is astronomical. There is a explosion of information. Inanimate systems have almost no memory, no information. They operate in the now. Living systems establish a critical distinction between the outside and the inside in order to maintain homeostasis. They repair themself and reproduce and evolve.

Thank you Louis - his work looks fascinating. I have downloaded two of his papers and will start reading them.

Standard evolutionary theory does not permit a definition of the living process because, within the context of the theory, the only necessary processes are those associated with natural selection. In other words, evolutionary theory describes HOW species come about, but has nothing to say with regard to what a living process SHOULD BE.

To speculate upon the possibility that all living processes share something fundamental in common necessarily involves quite strict constraints upon the type of answer that is possible/plausible and also, the type of answer that is interesting:

[It is a trivial fact that all buildings in Brickville are made of bricks even though this

fact may may be used as definitive of a buildings in Brickville.]

The above point may perhaps be made in a different way by thinking of the relationship between the cell and the human being. It may be true that all the living cells in a persons body contain DNA and this fact may be definitive of all living cells and, by extension, all life. But, it seems that a unifying principle such as this is trivial if it is not also definitive of the macroscopic ontology of a complex multicellular organism.

It follows from the above that any successful unifying and definitive principle must operate both at the macroscopic and microscopic scales - It must exhibit a fractal organisation. And, significantly, it must necessarily involve the collapse of the usual distinction between "metabolism" and "function". All this leads us to ask the question 'Is the evolution of life the evolution of a PARTICULAR TYPE of process.

The discovered principle should unify biology such that it will enable us to understand biological 'functions' as seemingly different as hearts and brains in the same way!

The theory should enable us to better reconcile the complexity, efficiency and robustness with thermodynamics.

And lastly - the new understanding must keep Occam happy - it must be simple.

I believe that if such a principle exists then the principle is CATALYSIS.

The evolution of life is the evolution of catalysis.

http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~davia/mbc/

Dept of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213. – also alternately titled: “Quantum Ontology: Minds, Brains, and Catalysts”.

Davia, C.J (June 2006), "Life, Catalysis and Excitable Media: A Dynamic Systems Approach to Metabolism and Cognition", in Tuszynski, J.A, The Emerging Physics of Consciousness (The Frontiers Collection), Springer, pp. 255–292, ISBN 978-3540238904

Carpenter, P.A; Davia, C.J. (2006). "A catalytic theory of embodied mind". Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2006): 1080–1085.

Carpenter, P.A.; Davia, C.J.; Vimal, R (2009). "Catalysis, Perception and Consciousness". New Mathematics and Natural Computation (NMNC) 5 (1): 287–306.