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Nov 2, 2023 · The strategy to define life consisted first in finding the traits common to all living systems and from them selecting which are the essential elements for life (the cornerstones of life), excluding reproduction and evolution because they are not required for life.
Feb 20, 2024 · Instead, we propose to raise a series of issues that we consider highly specific to life in order to define it, with special emphasis on fundamental parameters that apply iteratively to its different levels of organization, from the subatomic to the cellular and tissular scales.
Jul 27, 2021 · There is a short definition “Life is self-reproduction with variations” that is interesting for its brevity and because it includes two fundamental characteristics of living organisms: reproduction and evolution.
- Jaime Gómez-Márquez
- jaime.gomez.marquez@usc.es
- 2021
- The Operational Test
- Life Is Reproduction
- Autocatalytic Reactions
- Life Is Evolution by Natural Selection
- False Positives and False Negatives
- Acknowledgments
An operational definition requires a defining test. Let that test be a reenactment of the Labeled Release experiments of the Viking mission. These experiments showed that if Martian soil is mixed with a solution containing labeled nutrients, labeled gases are released. The release of gases resembles the behavior of life-bearing terrestrial samples....
Reproduction is perhaps the most popular definition of life. Three current introductory textbooks (Purves et al. 1998, Campbell et al. 1999, Solomon et al. 1999) list it as one of the major features of life. However, how well does it fare when used as the definition of life in a new Labeled Release experiment on Mars? It is easy to incorporate the ...
Many autocatalytic systems exist that are clearly not life. Many synthetic peptides and oligonucleotides are autocatalytic (Wilson 1998). For example, a 32-amino acid peptide with a structure based on a yeast transcription factor auto-catalyzes its own synthesis by joining a 15-amino acid and a 17-amino acid fragment (Lee et al. 1996). Although the...
Unlike life, fires lack heredity. In other words, fires lack the ability to acquire the characteristics of their “ancestors.” For example, although fires vary in color, temperature, and size, their characteristics at any instant depend only on their environment. A hot fire is hot because of its current supply of oxygen and fuel, not because the “an...
Choosing whether it is better to risk false positives or false negatives is not necessarily an objective process. If the issue is a new and tasty but potentially harmful artificial sweetener, extremely wary consumers might want to bias their judgment against false negatives during safety testing. That is, they may prefer to lose a good sweetener th...
I thank Mark Lonergan (University of Oregon), Cecilia Dahlberg (University of California, San Diego), Rebecca Chasan, four anonymous reviewers, and my students for helpful discussions and feedback. The ideas in this essay were first developed as the introductory lecture for my Evolution class (Zoology 440, University of Maryland, College Park, MD) ...
- Lin Chao
- 2000
Sep 21, 2023 · Life is an open system that draws matter and energy from its environment and gains energy by metabolizing its nutrients. Living systems store genetic information that flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. The reproduction of a parent cell to approximate copies of daughter cells is a hallmark of life.
- Sankar Chatterjee
Life Sciences attempts to untie the living things mysteries from the working of protein ‘machines’, to the growth of organism from a single cell to the majesty and intricacy of whole ecosystem.
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All living organisms share several key characteristics or functions: order, sensitivity or response to the environment, reproduction, growth and development, regulation, homeostasis, energy processing, adaptation, and evolution. When viewed together, these nine characteristics serve to define life. Order
