In contrast, there is the Darwinian definition, currently accepted by the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where “Life is a self-sustained

chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution”. But there are some
problems in this definition as well. By this definition, the origin of life is the same as
the origin of Darwinian evolution, so the possibility that an early cellular life on Earth
or some other world passed through a period of reproduction without replication (during
which Darwinian evolution was not yet established) is not taken into account. Besides
that, the living sterile organisms such as mules cannot reproduce, thus they are not
“capable of Darwinian evolution”. And finally, if we suspect of life in other planets, we
would have to ask the question: how long do we wait for a system to demonstrate that it
is “capable” of Darwinian evolution? (Cleland and Chyba 2002). Another critic is that
there is no proper characterization of the type of material organization that would allow
the beginning of a process of Darwinian evolution (like some sort of pre-genetic
metabolic organization), thus leaving out the individual-metabolic part of the
phenomenon of life (Ruiz-Mirazo, K. et al 2002) as it generally considers a population.
In other words, a strict Darwinian view leaves out the case of “life here and now”
(Luisi, P. 1998).

An interesting question regarding the question of life at the level of a single object and
in the “here and now” connotation appears because there are cases where the term life
may potentially apply to a single specimen. For instance, some consider our planet to be
self-maintaining and self-regenerating, as Lovelock (1979, 1988), Margulis and Sagan
(1995) proposed with the Gaia hypothesis. Within this hypothesis our planet is a super-
organism, but can it be considered living? Another interest point is the one of robots and
other artificial life artifacts which might be called living if we only take into
consideration the “life here and now” (Luisi, P. 1998).

To sum up, the problem of both definitions, the autopoietic and the Darwinian, is that
each focuses on just one of those two dimensions: the individual-metabolic (on the
autopoietic) and the collective-ecological (on the Darwinian) sides of the phenomenon
of life. As Oparin highlighted, these two definitions together show that the relationship
with the environment is one of the key ingredients to understand how a minimal self-
constructing chemical system operates (Ruiz-Mirazo, K. et al 2002).
The RNA world
Thinking about the origin of life, there are different lines of evidence supporting the
existence of an RNA world. These have led to proposals that the starting point for the
history of life on Earth was the de novo emergence of the RNA world from a
nucleotide-rich prebiotic soup. This implies that life can be so well defined that the
exact point at which it started can be established with the sudden appearance of the first
RNA-replicating molecule. Thus, there is a proposal that “ribosome-catalyzed, nucleic
acid–coded protein synthesis is the outcome of Darwinian selection of RNA-based
biological systems and not of mere physicochemical interactions that took place in the
prebiotic environment” (Tirard, S. 2010).

Sagan’s definitions of life

Despite the various information that each biological specialty (ecology, molecular
biology, biochemistry, etc) has provided, no general agreement exists on what it is that
is being studied. Sagan agrees that there is a tendency for each biological specialty to
define life in its own terms (Bedau, M. 2010). As a result three decades ago Sagan, in
1970, catalogued physiological, metabolic, biochemical, genetic, and thermodynamic
definitions:

Physiological: For many years a physiological definition of life was popular where life
was defined as “any system capable of performing a number of such functions as eating,
metabolizing, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and being responsive
to external stimuli.” But many of these properties are either present in machines that
nobody is willing to call alive, or absent from organisms that everybody is willing to
call alive.

Metabolic: It describes “a living system as an object with a definite boundary,

continually exchanging some of its materials with its surroundings, but without altering
its general properties, at least over some period of time”. But again there are exceptions
and the most known example are flames that also have a well-known capacity for
growth.

Biochemical: “A biochemical or molecular biological definition sees living organisms

as systems that contain reproducible hereditary information coded in nucleic acid
molecules and that metabolize by controlling the rate of chemical reactions using
proteinaceous catalysts known as enzymes.”

Genetic: life is “a system capable of evolution by natural selection”. This definition

places great emphasis on the importance of replication. But again, some organisms,
many hybrids for example, do not replicate at all, but their individual cells do. It is also
true that life defined in this way does not exclude synthetic duplication.

Thermodynamic: “living systems might then be defined as localized regions where

there is a continuous increase in order”. It would be better to clarify that these living
systems increase their order but at the expense of a larger decrease in order of the
universe outside.

Ewin Schrodinger’s “What is Life?”

There have been other attempts of defining life as the one by the physicist Erwin
Schrödinger in 1945. Schrödinger proposes to “develop first what you might call a
naive physicist's ideas about organisms” and he generally defined life as that which
resists decaying to disorder and equilibrium. He believed the heredity material (the
chromosome fiber) to be a molecule, which unlike a crystal does not repeat itself,
calling it an aperiodic crystal. For him, the aperiodic nature of that molecule allowed it
to encode an almost infinite number of possibilities with a small number of atoms, thus
being the material carrier of life. He also compared a clockwork with an organism
saying that “the latter hinges upon a solid –the aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary
substance, largely withdrawn from the disorder of heat motion” (Schrödinger, E. 1945).