How Will the Emerging Plurality of Lives Change How We Conceive of and Relate to Life? (original) (raw)

The Multiple Paths to Multiple Life

Journal of Molecular Evolution

We argue for multiple forms of life realized through multiple different historical pathways. From this perspective, there have been multiple origins of life on Earth—life is not a universal homology. By broadening the class of originations, we significantly expand the data set for searching for life. Through a computational analogy, the origin of life describes both the origin of hardware (physical substrate) and software (evolved function). Like all information-processing systems, adaptive systems possess a nested hierarchy of levels, a level of function optimization (e.g., fitness maximization), a level of constraints (e.g., energy requirements), and a level of materials (e.g., DNA or RNA genome and cells). The functions essential to life are realized by different substrates with different efficiencies. The functional level allows us to identify multiple origins of life by searching for key principles of optimization in different material form, including the prebiotic origin of pr...

The problem of defining life: a case study

2021

16 The question of how to define life has been an unresolved question in the philosophy of biology for 17 many years, but developing a definition of life that is useful in both technical and everyday contexts 18 has become more urgent as researchers around the world attempt to create fully synthetics cells in 19 the laboratory, develop more and more intelligent and autonomous robots, and search for 20 signatures of life elsewhere in the galaxy. Developments in these areas may end up overturning our 21 current ideas about the distinction between life and non-life. It is therefore important to consider 22 whether it is possible to develop a definition of life that encompasses currently known lifeforms, 23 while at the same time having the potential to be applied to as-yet unknown lifeforms. Here, we 24 discuss the pros and cons of some of the current approaches to defining life, then propose an 25 alternative approach based on family resemblance. We also present preliminary data apply...

PLS Sloan Alumni Seminars “ What is Life ? ” Introductory Discussion

2014

In developing an informed and critical engagement with contemporary life science from the standpoint of Catholic faith, or any philosophical or religious position, it is important to set the discussion for these seminars in a larger context. We are today dealing with a powerful historical convergence of genetics, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, cognitive neuroscience, embryological development theory, nanotechnology, and instrumentation, now being carried out in the framework of “big science” practiced in research universities and research medical schools, and also in major separate interdisciplinary institutions of research. This is a convergence that has generally taken place only in the last fifty years, and it now dominates research in the life sciences. This work is also supported by massive governmental and private funding. The Human Genome Project, which pursued the goal of sequencing the entire human genetic structure, is one manifestation of how this convergence ha...

Life is many: On the methods of biosemiotics

Biosemiotics in Transdisciplinary Contexts, 2007

A task of biosemiotics is to develop a theoretical biology based on semiotics. This would mean a redefinition of most concepts of general biology. This also means an application of semiotic methodology in empirical research. An aim of this essay is to gather some ideas on characterization of (bio)semiotic methods of research. The distinction between a 'physical eye' and a 'semiotic eye' is characterized via the differences between the physical and semiotic reality, as two major complementary ways of scientifically built world-views. The difference between the physical and semiotic corresponds to the ontological difference between one and many, or a monist and pluralist methodologies. This work was published as: Kull, K. 2007. Life is many: On the methods of biosemiotics. In: Witzany, Günther (ed.), Biosemiotics in Transdisciplinary Contexts: Proceedings of the Gathering in Biosemiotics 6, Salzburg 2006. Salzburg: Umweb, 193–202.

Defining Life: Synthesis and Conclusions

Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, 2010

The first part of the paper offers philosophical landmarks on the general issue of defining life. §1 defends that the recognition of "life" has always been and remains primarily an intuitive process, for the scientist as for the layperson. However we should not expect, then, to be able to draw a definition from this original experience, because our cognitive apparatus has not been primarily designed for this. §2 is about definitions in general. Two kinds of definition should be carefully distinguished: lexical definitions (based upon current uses of a word), and stipulative or legislative definitions, which deliberately assign a meaning to a word, for the purpose of clarifying scientific or philosophical arguments. The present volume provides examples of these two kinds of definitions. §3 examines three traditional philosophical definitions of life, all of which have been elaborated prior to the emergence of biology as a specific scientific discipline: life as animation (Aristotle), life as mechanism, and life as organization (Kant). All three concepts constitute a common heritage that structures in depth a good deal of our cultural intuitions and vocabulary any time we try to think about "life". The present volume offers examples of these three concepts in contemporary scientific discourse. The second part of the paper proposes a synthesis of the major debates developed in this volume. Three major questions have been discussed. A first issue ( §4) is whether we should define life or not, and why. Most authors are skeptical about the possibility of defining life in a strong way, although all admit that criteria are useful in contexts such as exobiology, artificial life and the origins of life. §5 examines the possible kinds of definitions of life presented in the volume. Those authors who have explicitly defended that a definition of life is needed, can be classified into two categories. The first category (or standard view) refers to two conditions: individual self-maintenance and the open-ended evolution of a collection of similar entities. The other category refuse to include reproduction and evolution, and take a sort of psychic view of the living. §6 examines the relationship between the question of the definition of life and that of the origins of life. There is a close parallel between the general conceptions of the origins of life and the definitions of life.

SEVEN METHODOLOGICAL MYTHS ABOUT DEFINING LIFE

Philosophy of the Living Nature,vol. 2, 14-32, 2017

This article analyzes methodological difficulties with defining life. Particular emphasis will be placed on exploring beliefs that (allegedly) provide arguments for skeptics who claim that life escapes definition (with the current stage of scientific knowledge or in general). After a thorough analysis, these arguments in fact proved to be methodological myths. They might be justified to some extent, but their importance is definitely overestimated. There is the myth of essentialism, the myth of ('wrong') conventionalism, the myth of excessive diversification of the definitions of life, the myth of impossibility of operationalization, the myth of unstoppable force of counterexamples, the myth of universalism, and the myth of linguistic pitfalls. Apart from addressing these illusory difficulties, I discuss methodological issues relevant to the definition of life, including: 1) the (potential) conflict between heuristic and explanatory-predictive function of the definition of life, 2) the problem of focus of the definition of life, 3) the (relative) problem of a non-arbitrary selection of the criteria of life, and 4) the question of the historicity of biology in the context of defining life. I also comment on the role of philosophers of biology in developing the definition of life. Keywords: definition of life, skepticism about defining life, methodology of defining life, scientific definition

Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond - Stefan Helmreich

For Nature the promise of synthetic biology was not that the field might once and for all define "life, " but rather, perhaps counterintuitively, that it might provide "a welcome antidote to chronic vitalism. " 9 "Synthetic biology's view of life as a molecular process lacking moral thresholds at the level of the cell, " Nature elaborated, could serve as a counter to worries about biotechnology researchers "playing God" and might even "be invoked to challenge characterizations of life that are sometimes used to defend religious dogma about the embryo. " 10 Not quite noticing that their attempt to diffuse moral arguments about human conception and procreation was itself a moral argument, Nature's editors swore off life as a metaphysical idea, concluding, "We might now be permitted to dismiss the idea that life is a precise scientific concept. " 11 But where would biology be without "life"? In 2010, Science published a paper claiming that microbes might be able to employ arsenic-in place of phosphorus-as one of the six chemical building blocks of life. 12 The geomicro biologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a lead researcher on the project, suggested at a televised NASA news conference on astrobiology that her team, which isolated a microbe from Mono Lake and fed it in an arsenic broth, had "cracked open the door to what's possible for life elsewhere in the universe. " "This microbe, " she said, "if we are correct, has solved the challenge of being alive in a different way. " 13 Far from dismissing life as a scientific concept, this declaration amped up "life" as a frame within which ever-more expansive claims might be made. As it happened, in 2012, other scientists proved unable to replicate Wolfe-Simon's result, and microbe GFAJ-1 vanished as a candidate for life-as-it-could-be. 14 But another scientific claim about the capaciousness of life then arrived in 2013, when Nature announced in a headline that the sequencing of the "genome of the largest viruses yet discovered hints at [a] 'fourth domain' of life" 15-that, in addition to Eucarya, Bacteria, and Archaea, biologists might need to nominate a whole new domain (a higher-level classification than the more familiar kingdom) in order to account for the genetic distinctiveness of mega-viruses. Life, precise or no, would not, it seemed, be waved away so easily as Nature had proposed back in 2007. Even the boundary figure of the virus-usually designated as not quite alive, wriggling between animate and inanimate-could be invited into life's dominion. The scientists who sequenced the outsized, new-to-science, viral genome at first named this entity simply "new life form. " When they considered the unexpected directions toward which the virus might point biology, they dubbed it Pandoravirus. "Life" seemed to be bursting out of the box, yes, but also remained contained within the frames of bioscience. Life, ever the vexingly imprecise concept for biologists, seems today to have entered a fresh identity crisis. Should life be cut down to size, scaled down from any metaphysical, special status? Or should life be scaled upward and outward to embrace and explain the unexpected and as-yet unknown? The answer, for scientists, seems to be both. Life, for those biologists operating at the edges of their conceptual categories, is in a volatile state, pragmatically and theoretically.

What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies

Critical Inquiry, 2011

What is life? A gathering consensus in anthropology, science studies, and philosophy of biology suggests that the theoretical object of biology, "life," is today in transformation, if not dissolution. Proliferating reproductive technologies, along with genomic reshufflings of biomatter in such practices as cloning, have unwound the facts of life.