NAME:ELYKA GALZOTE DATE:FEB.17.

20
SUBJECT:

Theory of life,
Perhaps no other system is as unique to planet Earth as the biosphere, which includes all forms of
life. Life occurs nearly everywhere on, above, and even under the surface of the planet. In terms
of actual biomass, it is likely that microbes that live beneath the surface exceed that of all the
surface life, plants, and animals.. The origin of life is a subject of on-going research and is
considered one of events in Earth's history. One of the exciting questions is whether life actually
formed here on Earth or if it was transferred here from elsewhere in the solar system.
Life is often defined in basic biology textbooks in terms of a list of distinctive properties that
distinguish living systems from non-living. Although there is some overlap, these lists are often
different, depending upon the interests of the authors.
Each attempt at a definition are inextricably linked to a theory from which it derives its meaning
(Benner 2010). Some biologists and philosophers even reject the whole idea of there being a
need for a definition, since life for them is an irreducible fact about the natural world. Others see
life simply as that which biologists study. There have been three main philosophical approaches
to the problem of defining life that remain relevant today: Aristotle's view of life as animation, a
fundamental, irreducible property of nature; Descartes's view of life as mechanism; and Kant's
view of life as organization, to which we need to add Darwin's concept of variation and evolution
through natural selection (Gayon 2010; Morange 2008). In addition we may add the idea of
defining life as an emergent property of particular kinds of complex systems (Weber 2010).
This is trying to define life during the twentieth century with the rise of biochemistry and
molecular biology. But this was the century that saw the rise of artificial intelligence, artificial
life, and complex systems theory and so the concern includes these perspectives. Animate beings
share a range of properties and phenomena that are not seen together in inanimate matter,
although examples of matter exhibiting one or the other of these can be found. Living entities
metabolize, grow, die, reproduce, respond, move,heritable variability, and have lineages which
can evolve over generational time, producing new and emergent functional structures that
provide increased adaptive fitness in changing environments.
Reproduction involves not only the replication of the nucleic acids that carry the genetic
information but the epigenetic building of the organism through a sequence of developmental
steps. Such reproduction through development occurs within a larger life-cycle of the organism,
which includes its senescence and death. Something that is alive has organized, complex
structures that carry out these functions as well as sensing and responding to interior states and to
the external environment and engaging in movement within that environment.
It must be remembered that evolutionary phenomena are an inextricable aspect of living
systems; any attempt to define life in the absence of this diachronic perspective will be futile. It
will be argued below that living systems may be defined as open systems maintained in steady-
states, far-from-equilibrium, due to matter-energy flows in which informed (genetically)
autocatalytic cycles extract energy, build complex internal structures, allowing growth even as
they create greater entropy in their environments, and capable, over multigenerational time. of
evolution
Reference:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life/https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.livescience.com/amp/
13363-7-theories-origin-life.html