Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xm8r8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-04T01:09:34.902Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

25 - A universal definition of life: autonomy and open-ended evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2010

Mark A. Bedau  and
Carol E. Cleland
By
Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo ,
Juli Peretó  and
Alvaro Moreno
Mark A. Bedau
Affiliation:
Reed College, Oregon
Carol E. Cleland
Affiliation:
University of Colorado, Boulder
Get access

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Definitions of life are highly controversial. And it is not just a question of lack of consensus among the different proposals formulated so far. Some authors are very skeptical about the actual possibility of grasping “in any scientifically relevant language” such a complex and multifarious phenomenon. Others think that we have to wait until biological theory(ies) become more rigorous, more encompassing and meaningful. And some others consider that it is not worth undertaking the challenge since, even if we could obtain a proper definition of life, it would still be a rather conventional one and would probably have little influence on the development of specific research programs in biology.

The living phenomenology shows, indeed, many different sides (that appear at various levels of organization) and it is not easy to capture all of them in a single conceptual scheme. This is made even more difficult by life's ability to diversify and explore its own limits (always producing border-line cases, exceptions to the rule, …). Last century's impressive advances in molecular biology have revealed a great underlying biochemical unity of all living forms, but it is not clear to what extent this is the result of contingency or of real necessity: i.e., whether that unity can serve to extract general biological principles or just derives from having a universal common ancestor of all terrestrial life.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Nature of Life
Classical and Contemporary Perspectives from Philosophy and Science
 , pp. 310 - 325
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Benner, S. A. (1999). How small can a microorganism be?In the Space Studies Board and the National Research Council, Size limits of very small microorganisms: Proceedings of a workshop (pp. 126–135). Washington DC: National Academy Press.
Bro, P. (1997). Chemical reaction automata. Complexity, 2, 38–44.3.0.CO;2-J>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, D. R. & Wiley, E. O. (1988). Evolution as entropy: Toward a unified theory of biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cleland, C. E. & Chyba, C. F. (2002). Defining ‘life.’Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 32, 387–393.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duve, C. (1991). Blueprint for a cell: The nature and origin of life (p. 9). Burlington NC: Neil Patterson.
Deamer, D. W. (1998). Membrane compartments in prebiotic evolution. In Brack, A., (Ed.), The molecular origins of life: Assembling the pieces of the puzzle (pp. 189–205). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Doolittle, W. F. (1999). Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science, 284, 2124–2128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dyson, F. J. (1985). Origins of life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Eigen, M. (1992). Steps toward life: A perspective on evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Eigen, M. & Schuster, P. (1979). The hypercycle: A principle of natural self-organization. New York: Springer.CrossRef
Emmeche, C. (1998). Defining life as a semiotic phenomenon. Cybernet: Human knowing. New York: Springer.
Farmer, J. D. & Belin, A. d' A. (1992). Artificial life: The coming evolution. In Langton, C. G., Taylor, C., Farmer, J. D., and Rasmussen, S. (Eds.), Artificial life II (Santa Fe Institute studies in the sciences of complexity proceedings, vol. X) (pp. 815–838). Redwood City, CA: Adison-Wesley.
Fernández, J., Moreno, A., & Etxeberria, A. (1991). Life as emergence: The roots of a new paradigm in theoretical biology. World Futures, 32, 133–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleischaker, G. R. (1988). Autopoiesis: The status of its system logic. BioSystems, 22, 37–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fleishaker, G. R. (1994). A few precautionary words concerning terminology. In Fleishaker, G. R., Colonna, S., and Luisi, P. L. (Eds.), Self-production of supramolecular structures from synthetic structures to models of minimal living systems (pp. 33–41). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Gánti, T. (1987). The principle of life. Budapest: OMIKK.
Haynes, R. H. (1990). Ecce eccepoiesis: Playing God on Mars. In MacNiven, D. (Ed.), Moral expertise: Studies in practical and professional ethics (pp. 161–183), London: Routledge.
Hitchcock, D. R., & Lovelock, J. E. (1967). Life detection by atmospheric analysis. Icarus, 7, 149–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffmeyer, J. & Emmeche, C. (1991). Code-duality and the semiotics of nature. In Anderson, M. and Merrell, F. (Eds.), On semiotic modeling (pp. 117–166). New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Joyce, G. F. (1994). Foreword. In Deamer, D. W. and Fleischaker, G. R. (Eds.), Origins of life: The central concepts (pp. xi–xii). Boston: Jones & Bartlett.
Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The origins of order: Self-organization and selection in evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kauffman, S. A. (2000), Autonomous agents. In Kauffman, S. A., Investigations (pp. 49–80). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Koshland, D. E.. (2002). The seven pillars of life. Science, 295, 2215–2216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lazcano, A. (2001). Origin of life. In Briggs, D. E. G. and Crowther, P. R. (Eds.), Paleobiology II (pp. 3–8). Oxford: Blackwell Science.
Lewontin, R. C. (1970). The units of selection. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 1, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lovelock, J. E. (1988). The ages of Gaia. New York: Norton.
Lovelock, J. E. & Margulis, L. (1974a). Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: The Gaia hypothesis. Tellus, 26, 2–10.Google Scholar
Lovelock, J. E. & Margulis, L. (1974b). Homeostatic tendencies of the Earth's atmosphere. Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 1, 12–22.Google Scholar
Luisi, P. L. (1994). The chemical implementation of autopoiesis. In Fleischaker, G. R., Colonna, S., and Luisi, P. L. (Eds.), Self-production of supramolecular structures from synthetic structures to models of minimal living systems (pp. 179–197). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Luisi, P. L. (1998). About various definitions of life. Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 28, 613–622.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Margulis, L. (1990). Big trouble in biology: Physiological autopoiesis versus mechanistic neo-Darwinism. In Brockman, J. (Ed.), Doing science: The reality club 2 (pp. 211–235). New York: Prentice Hall.
Margulis, L. & Sagan, D. (2002). Darwin's dilemma. In Acquiring genomes: A theory of the origin of species (pp. 25–50). New York: Basic Books.
Maturana, H. & Varela, F. J. (1973). De máquinas y seres vivos—Una teoría sobre la organización biológica. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria S. A.
Maynard Smith, J. (1986). The problems of biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Maynard Smith, J. & Szathmáry, E. (1995). The major transitions in evolution. Oxford: Freeman and Co.
Mayr, E. (1982). The growth of biological thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McMullin, B. (2000). John von Neumann and the evolutionary growth of complexity: Looking backward, looking forward…Artificial Life, 6, 347–361.Google Scholar
Moreno, A. & Fernández, J. (1990). Structural limits for evolutive capacities in molecular complex systems. Biology Forum, 83, 335–347.Google Scholar
Moreno, A. & Ruiz-Mirazo, K. (2002). Key issues regarding the origin, nature and evolution of complexity in nature: Information as a central concept to understand biological organizations. Emergence, 4, 63–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moreno, A., Umerez, J., & Fernandez, J. (1994). Definition of life and research program in artificial life. Ludus Vitalis, 2, 15–33.Google Scholar
Morowitz, H. J. (1968). Energy flow in biology. New York: Academic Press.
Morowitz, H. J. (1981). Phase separation, charge separation, and biogenesis. BioSystems, 14, 41–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morowitz, H. J. (1992). Beginning of cellular life. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Morowitz, H. J., Heinz, B., & Deamer, D. W. (1988). The chemical logic of a minimal protocell. Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 18, 281–287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nicolis, G. & Prigogine, Y. (1977). Self organization in non-equilibrium systems. New York: Wiley.
Oparin, A. I. (1961). The nature of life. In Oparin, A. I., Life: Its nature, origin and development (pp. 1–37). New York: Academic Press.
Pattee, H. H. (1967). Quantum mechanics, heredity and the origin of life. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 17, 410–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pattee, H H. (1977). Dynamic and linguistic modes of complex systems. International Journal of General Systems, 3, 259–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pattee, H. H. (1982). Cell psychology: An evolutionary approach to the symbol-matter problem. Cognition and Brain Theory, 4, 325–341.Google Scholar
Pattee, H. H. (1997). The physics of symbols and evolution of semiotic controls. In Coombs, M. (Ed.), Workshop on control mechanisms for complex systems: Issues of measurement and semiotic analysis. Las Cruces, NM: New Mexico State University.
Páyli, G., Zucchi, C, & Caglioti, L. (2002). Fundamentals of life. Paris: Elsevier.
Rosen, R. (1991). Life itself: A comprehensive inquiry into the nature, origin, and fabrication of life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ruiz-Mirazo, K. (2001). Condiciones físicas para la aparición de sistemas autónomas con capacidades evolutivas abiertas. Ph.D. dissertation, San Sebastián, Univerisity of the Basque Country.
Ruiz-Mirazo, K. & Moreno, A. (1998). Autonomy and emergence: How systems became agents through the generation of functional constraints. In Farre, G. L. and Oksala, T. (Eds.), Emergence, complexity, hierarchy, organization (selected and edited papers from the ECHO III conference) (pp. 273–282). Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica, MA91. Espoo-Helsiniki: The Finnish Academy of Technology.
Ruiz-Mirazo, K. & Moreno, A. (2000). Searching for the roots of autonomy: The natural and artificial paradigms revisited. Journal for the Integrated Study of Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Applied Epistemology, 17, 209–228.Google Scholar
Sagan, C, (1970). Life. In Encyclopedia Britannica. London: William Benton.
Sagan, D. & Margulis, L. (1984). Gaia and philosophy. In Rouner, L. S. (Ed.), On nature (pp. 60–75). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Segré, D., Ben-Eli, D., & Lancet, D. (2000). Compositional genomes: Prebiotic information transfer in mutually catalytic non-covalent assemblies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97, 4112–4117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shapiro, R. (2002). Monomer world. In Abstracts of the 13th international conference on the origin of life, 10th ISSOL meeting (p. 60). Oxtaca, Mexico.
Shapiro, R. & Feinburg, G. (1990). Possible forms of life in environments very different from the Earth. In Leslie, J. (Ed.), Physical cosmology and philosophy (pp. 248–255). New York: Macmillan.
Szostak, J. W., Bartel, P., & Luisi, P. L. (2001). Synthesizing life. Nature, 409, 387–390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Umerez, J. (1995). Semantic closure: A guiding notion to ground artificial life. In Moran, F., Moreno, A., Merelo, J. J., and Chaco, P. (Eds.), Advances in artificial life (pp. 77–94). Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
Varela, F. J. (1979). Principles of biological autonomy. New York: Elsevier.
Varela, F. J. (1994). On defining life. In Fleischaker, G. R., Colonna, S., and Luisi, P. L. (Eds.), Advances in artificial life (pp. 23–31). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.
Neumann, J. (1966). Theory of self reproducing automata, edited byBurkes, A. W.. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois.
Wächterchäuser, W. (1988). Before enzymes and templates: Theory of surface metabolism. Microbiological Reviews, 52, 452–484.Google Scholar
Wicken, J. S. (1987). Evolution, thermodynamics, and information: Extending the Darwinian program. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×