Parke, Emily C
(2021)
Characterizing life: four dimensions and their relevance to origin of life research.
[Preprint]
Abstract
The question ‘What is life?’ has been debated since antiquity, and continues to confound scientists and philosophers today. There are over 100 proposed answers to that question in the literature. Some authors continue to propose new answers, and others argue about whether or not we should just give up. Following several recent contributions to the latter ‘meta-debate’ about life, this chapter suggests a pluralist approach to characterizing life: multiple characterizations of life can co-exist, for different but often complementary purposes. After discussing the relevance of characterizing life for origin of life research, this chapter offers a new way to think about the landscape of characterizing life in terms of four conceptual dimensions: (1) treating life as an all-or-nothing phenomenon or as a matter of degree, and characterizing life (2) materially or functionally, (3) at the individual or community level, and (4) minimally or inclusively. Depending on which agenda is at stake within origin of life research—for example, explaining the actual origin of life on Earth, versus explaining how life could, in principle, emerge anywhere at all—the sorts of features we might want in a characterization of life can vary along these four dimensions.
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