11/14/2023 0 Comments La nasa meaningWhat is the definition of life? I remember a conference of the scientific elite that sought to answer that question. As president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (which publishes the prestigious journal Science), Koshland recounted his own experience with a committee that was charged to generate a definition of life: Also not new is a certain imprecision in the language used to address this question and therefore an imprecision in the consequent ideas.ĭaniel Koshland recently provided an anecdote that illustrates this imprecision (Koshland, 2002). The question is hardly new, nor is the recognition of its difficulty. Astrobiology 10, 1021–1030.Ī strobiologists are committed to studying life in the Cosmos, the terran life we know as well as the extraterran life we do not know but hope to encounter. Key Words: Evolution-Life-Life detection-Biosignatures. Last, we ask what chemical structures might support Darwinian evolution universally these structures might be universal biosignatures. And we consider how a definition centered on Darwinian evolution might itself be forced to change as supra-Darwinian species emerge, including in our descendents, and consider the chances of our encountering supra-Darwinian species in our exploration of the Cosmos. We also look at how constructive beliefs about biosignatures change as observational data accumulate. Accordingly, this article discusses various definitions of life held in the astrobiology community by considering their connected “theories of life.” These include certain “list” definitions and a popular definition that holds that life is a “self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” We then act as “anthropologists,” studying what scientists do to determine which definition-theories of life they constructively hold as they design missions to seek non-terran life. Any definition is intricately connected to a theory that gives it meaning.
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