What is Life?
We believe the question of what life is to be something of a trick: language leads us to supply a noun whereas, in truth, life is an open thermodynamic system that can persist in a dormant state but will not be alive in the vernacular sense if it is not actively transforming energy. For example, all known life is composed of astronomically carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur atoms--yet over the radiometrically dated existence of life on Earth for the past nearly four billion years life has integrated many other elements besides: calcium (found in milk and seashells), silicon (a key ingredient of computers), magnetite (used by bacteria to sense Earth's magnetic poles) and so on. Because life is continuously growing, reproducing, and evolving, it cannot be pinned down by a final definition: it is more like a verb than a noun.
"Life is something edible, lovable, or lethal."
James E. Lovelock
This quote highlights the way we, and other life forms, recognize life at an unconscious level without necessarily being able to define it. The word define means to put an end on, to fix or mark the limits of, to put boundaries around in order to explain. This is difficult to do for a process in which growth and change is intrinsic. Nonetheless, because organisms have been killing each other for food, and recognizing each other for mates, for literally thousands of millions of years, we tend, like the supreme court justice who said he can't define pornography but he knows it when he sees it, to know life at a visceral level prior to academic definitions.
It is ironic that biology textbooks, which one might expect to have the last word on the subject of life, forget even to put the first word--the definition. This is obviously due to the difficulty in providing a cogent definition of the subject at hand. Literature, by facing the problem without pretending to answer it in a final way, has sometimes fared better. Here is the great German novelist, Thomas Mann, writing in The Magic Mountain:
"What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was...it was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material?--it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being. It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition."
Thomas Mann
Scientists are beginning to restate Mann's insights more precisely:
"Life is not a thing or a fluid any more than heat is. What we ogbswerver are some unusual sets of objects separated from the rest of the world by certain peculiar porperties such as growth, reproduction, and special ways of handling energy. These objects we elect to call 'living things.'"
Robert Morrison
In his famous short story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges describes a make believe planet called Tlon in the southern hemisphere of which the inhabitants use languages that have no nouns, such that for example, they would not use the word moon but rather a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate..."'The moon rose above the river is...literally: 'upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.'...They do not say 'moon,' but rather 'round airy-light on dark' or 'pale-orange-of-the-sky' or any other such combination." (This story can be found in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings.) But Borges's whimsical planet with its nounless southern hemisphere is a lesson for those who would like to define with an air of academic finality exactly what life is. Life is a process connected to the entire universe. Each of us, as open energy systems, is theoretically connected not only to the remotest past of the cosmos but also to its final future--if the universe has a final future. Some have suggested that that future will be one of Earth's life spread throughout the cosmos. Others suggest that the distances between the stars are so great that there is no chance we, or even our robotic offspring, will ever populate the universe.
As Emily Dickinson put it in poem 96 (her poems were not published during her lifetime, although she is now recognized with Walt Whitman as perhaps one of the two greatest American poets):
WHAT mystery pervades a well!
The water lives so far,
Like neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar.
The grass does not appear afraid;
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is dread to me.
Related somehow they may be,—
The sedge stands next the sea,
Where he is floorless, yet of fear
No evidence gives he.
But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.
To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.
For those who would like to get closer, we recommend the Sciencewriters book, What is Life?
"Life is something edible, lovable, or lethal."
James E. Lovelock
This quote highlights the way we, and other life forms, recognize life at an unconscious level without necessarily being able to define it. The word define means to put an end on, to fix or mark the limits of, to put boundaries around in order to explain. This is difficult to do for a process in which growth and change is intrinsic. Nonetheless, because organisms have been killing each other for food, and recognizing each other for mates, for literally thousands of millions of years, we tend, like the supreme court justice who said he can't define pornography but he knows it when he sees it, to know life at a visceral level prior to academic definitions.
It is ironic that biology textbooks, which one might expect to have the last word on the subject of life, forget even to put the first word--the definition. This is obviously due to the difficulty in providing a cogent definition of the subject at hand. Literature, by facing the problem without pretending to answer it in a final way, has sometimes fared better. Here is the great German novelist, Thomas Mann, writing in The Magic Mountain:
"What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was...it was not matter and it was not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon conveyed by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material?--it was sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself, the incontinent form of being. It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic gas and material impurities of mysterious origin and composition."
Thomas Mann
Scientists are beginning to restate Mann's insights more precisely:
"Life is not a thing or a fluid any more than heat is. What we ogbswerver are some unusual sets of objects separated from the rest of the world by certain peculiar porperties such as growth, reproduction, and special ways of handling energy. These objects we elect to call 'living things.'"
Robert Morrison
In his famous short story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges describes a make believe planet called Tlon in the southern hemisphere of which the inhabitants use languages that have no nouns, such that for example, they would not use the word moon but rather a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate..."'The moon rose above the river is...literally: 'upward behind the onstreaming it mooned.'...They do not say 'moon,' but rather 'round airy-light on dark' or 'pale-orange-of-the-sky' or any other such combination." (This story can be found in Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings.) But Borges's whimsical planet with its nounless southern hemisphere is a lesson for those who would like to define with an air of academic finality exactly what life is. Life is a process connected to the entire universe. Each of us, as open energy systems, is theoretically connected not only to the remotest past of the cosmos but also to its final future--if the universe has a final future. Some have suggested that that future will be one of Earth's life spread throughout the cosmos. Others suggest that the distances between the stars are so great that there is no chance we, or even our robotic offspring, will ever populate the universe.
As Emily Dickinson put it in poem 96 (her poems were not published during her lifetime, although she is now recognized with Walt Whitman as perhaps one of the two greatest American poets):
WHAT mystery pervades a well!
The water lives so far,
Like neighbor from another world
Residing in a jar.
The grass does not appear afraid;
I often wonder he
Can stand so close and look so bold
At what is dread to me.
Related somehow they may be,—
The sedge stands next the sea,
Where he is floorless, yet of fear
No evidence gives he.
But nature is a stranger yet;
The ones that cite her most
Have never passed her haunted house,
Nor simplified her ghost.
To pity those that know her not
Is helped by the regret
That those who know her, know her less
The nearer her they get.
For those who would like to get closer, we recommend the Sciencewriters book, What is Life?
© 2005 by Sciencewriters
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