Descriptive
Further information: Organism
Since there is no consensus for a definition of life, most current definitions in
biology are descriptive. Life is considered a characteristic of something that
preserves, furthers or reinforces its existence in the given environment. This
implies all or most of the following traits:[7][16][17][18][19][20]
1. Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a
constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature.
2. Organisation: being structurally composed of one or more cells – the
basic units of life.
3. Metabolism: transformation of energy, used to convert chemicals into
cellular components (anabolism) and to decompose organic matter
(catabolism). Living things require energy for homeostasis and other
activities.
4. Growth: maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A
growing organism increases in size and structure.
5. Adaptation: the evolutionary process whereby an organism becomes
better able to live in its habitat.[21][22][23]
6. Response to stimuli: such as the contraction of a unicellular
organism away from external chemicals, the complex reactions
involving all the senses of multicellular organisms, or the motion of the
leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism),
and chemotaxis.
7. Reproduction: the ability to produce new individual organisms,
either asexually from a single parent organism or sexually from two
parent organisms.
Physics
Further information: Entropy and life
From a physics perspective, an organism is a thermodynamic system with an
organised molecular structure that can reproduce itself and evolve as survival
dictates.[24][25] Thermodynamically, life has been described as an open system
which makes use of gradients in its surroundings to create imperfect copies of
itself.[26] Another way of putting this is to define life as "a self-sustained
chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution", a definition
adopted by a NASA committee attempting to define life for the purposes
of exobiology, based on a suggestion by Carl Sagan.[27][28] This definition,
however, has been widely criticised because according to it, a single sexually
reproducing individual is not alive as it is incapable of evolving on its own.[29]
Living systems
Main article: Living systems
Others take a living systems theory viewpoint that does not necessarily
depend on molecular chemistry. One systemic definition of life is that living
things are self-organizing and autopoietic (self-producing). Variations of this
include Stuart Kauffman's definition as an autonomous agent or a multi-agent
system capable of reproducing itself, and of completing at least
one thermodynamic work cycle.[30] This definition is extended by the evolution
of novel functions over time.[31] Living systems are characterized by a
multiscale, hierarchical organization, spanning from molecular machines to
cells, organs, tissues, organisms, populations, ecosystems, up to the whole
biosphere.[32]
Death
Main article: Death
Animal corpses, like this African buffalo, are
recycled by the ecosystem, providing energy and nutrients for living organisms.
Death is the termination of all vital functions or life processes in an organism
or cell.[33][34] One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from
life. Death would seem to refer to either the moment life ends, or when the
state that follows life begins.[34] However, determining when death has
occurred is difficult, as cessation of life functions is often not simultaneous
across organ systems.[35] Such determination, therefore, requires drawing
conceptual lines between life and death. This is problematic because there is
little consensus over how to define life. The nature of death has for millennia
been a central concern of the world's religious traditions and of philosophical
inquiry. Many religions maintain faith in either a kind
of afterlife or reincarnation for the soul, or resurrection of the body at a later
date.[36]
Viruses
Main article: Virus
Adenoviruses as seen under an electron
microscope
Whether or not viruses should be considered as alive is controversial.[37]
[38]
They are most often considered as just gene coding replicators rather than
forms of life.[39] They have been described as "organisms at the edge of
life"[40] because they possess genes, evolve by natural selection,[41][42] and
replicate by making multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly.
However, viruses do not metabolise and they require a host cell to make new
products. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the study
of the origin of life, as it may support the hypothesis that life could have
started as self-assembling organic molecules.[43][44]
History of study
Materialism
Main article: Materialism
Some of the earliest theories of life were materialist, holding that all that exists
is matter, and that life is merely a complex form or arrangement of
matter. Empedocles (430 BC) argued that everything in the universe is made
up of a combination of four eternal "elements" or "roots of all": earth, water,
air, and fire. All change is explained by the arrangement and rearrangement
of these four elements. The various forms of life are caused by an appropriate
mixture of elements.[45] Democritus (460 BC) was an atomist; he thought that
the essential characteristic of life was having a soul (psyche), and that the
soul, like everything else, was composed of fiery atoms. He elaborated on fire
because of the apparent connection between life and heat, and because fire
moves.[46] Plato, in contrast, held that the world was organised by
permanent forms, reflected imperfectly in matter; forms provided direction or
intelligence, explaining the regularities observed in the world.[47]
The mechanistic materialism that originated in ancient Greece was revived
and revised by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who
held that animals and humans were assemblages of parts that together
functioned as a machine. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz emphasised
the hierarchical organization of living machines, noting in his
book Monadology (1714) that "...the machines of nature, that is living bodies,
are still machines in their smallest parts, to infinity."[48] This idea was
developed further by Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1750) in his
book L'Homme Machine.[49] In the 19th century the advances in cell theory in
biological science encouraged this view. The evolutionary theory of Charles
Darwin (1859) is a mechanistic explanation for the origin of species by means
of natural selection.[50] At the beginning of the 20th century Stéphane
Leduc (1853–1939) promoted the idea that biological processes could be
understood in terms of physics and chemistry, and that their growth
resembled that of inorganic crystals immersed in solutions of sodium silicate.
His ideas, set out in his book La biologie synthétique,[51] were widely dismissed
during his lifetime, but has incurred a resurgence of interest in the work of
Russell, Barge and colleagues.[52]
Hylomorphism
Main article: Hylomorphism
The structure of the souls of
plants, animals, and humans, according to Aristotle
Hylomorphism is a theory first expressed by the Greek
philosopher Aristotle (322 BC). The application of hylomorphism to biology
was important to Aristotle, and biology is extensively covered in his extant
writings. In this view, everything in the material universe has both matter and
form, and the form of a living thing is its soul (Greek psyche, Latin anima).
There are three kinds of souls: the vegetative soul of plants, which causes
them to grow and decay and nourish themselves, but does not cause motion
and sensation; the animal soul, which causes animals to move and feel; and
the rational soul, which is the source of consciousness and reasoning, which
(Aristotle believed) is found only in man.[53] Each higher soul has all of the
attributes of the lower ones. Aristotle believed that while matter can exist
without form, form cannot exist without matter, and that therefore th
