The Explosion of Life Forms. Группа авторов

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P., Goto, A., Monnard, P.-A., Wessicken, M., Luisi, P.L. (1994a). Oparin’s reactions revisited: enzymatic synthesis of poly(adenylic acid) in micelles and self-reproducing vesicles. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 116, 7541–7547.

      Walde, P., Wick, R., Fresta, M., Mangone, A., Luisi, P.L. (1994b). Autopoietic self-reproduction of fatty acid vesicles. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 116, 11649–11654.

      Zepik, H.H., Rajamani, S., Maurel, M.C., Deamer, D. (2007). Oligomerization of thioglutamic acid: encapsulated reactions and lipid catalysis. Orig. Life Evol. Biosph., 37, 495–505.

      1 1 Hadean: comes from the name Hades, which refers to the Greek god of the underworld.

      2 2 Archean: from the ancient Greek Aρχή/Arkhē, which means “beginning, origin”.

      3 3 MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

      4 4 TIGR: The Institute for Genomic Research.

      2

      The Nature of Life

       Andreas LOSCH

       Faculty of Theology, University of Bern, Switzerland

      How can we characterize the nature of life? Against other assumptions, science has shown that life is nothing but physics and chemistry, and that there is no mysterious vital force included. Still, life strikes us as special. Can we describe this by its form? What definitions of life are actually in use? Maybe we need another sort of language to describe life’s specialty.

      This chapter will deal with the question of the nature of Life on Earth, so life-as-we-know it. The astrobiological quest for the search for extraterrestrial life is certainly very worthwhile to pursue, as in the case of success we would have a greater sample of life than only the one sharing common ancestry on Earth and hence would probably learn a great deal more about the laws of nature governing the emergence of life (Sagan 2010, p. 306). Does every life need to follow the “right-handed” chirality (orientation) of its molecules employed by Earth life, for instance? Does life need to be carbon-based or is this only valid for its Earthly form?

      In the current absence of such further samples, I believe it, however, to be most important to stick to what we know about Earth life to attempt at understanding more of its very nature. We do not know so very much about its origins and its essence, besides that it is physics and chemistry, with an evolutionary history, for sure (Lazcano 2017b, p. 90).

      The idea of teleological or goal directed attributes of life has reappeared from time to time in the discussion. Immanuel Kant, for instance, was a very prominent proponent of the idea of teleology. Even Darwin seems to have made some use of his version of the concept, but only in his notebooks (Lennox 1993). More recently, but still before the dawn of mature Darwinism, embryologist Hans Driesch turned into a philosopher when postulating a vital force as being responsible for the possibility of two perfect embryos developing from an egg separated into two after the first cleavage division (Mayr 1982, p. 118).

      The approach has been discarded by a vast majority of biologists, who are keen to point out that there is no entelechy at work which distinguishes life from non-life. Ernst Mayr, for instance, would acknowledge some sort of teleonomy in individuals, namely systems operating based on a program of coded information (Mayr 1965, p. 42), but “there is no evidence that would support teleology in the sense of various vitalistic or finalistic theories” (Mayr 1965, p. 43). I suppose those theories might be projections from how we ourselves perceive the world as assumingly willful beings.

      Although the Aristotelian world view has been an empirical approach, its conclusions were extrapolations from how things appeared to us, from our own observations. Reality can be trickier than that and we sometimes must leave our own point of view: to understand that the sun does not revolve around Earth, for instance, although observationally it may at first look like it when it rises and sets. Only more careful observations of the celestial constellations made the emergence of the heliocentric world view possible, even before we could leave our Earthbound perspective behind.

      This may remind us that our language carries with it a certain world-view and tradition and we must be cautious about the words we use and sometimes question their traditional annotations. We know today that the observation of all life performing breathing or even just requiring air in a strict sense is certainly wrong, as life must have already emerged in an environment when there was no oxygen-rich atmosphere on Earth (Catling 2013, p. 32). Yet some ideas of religious thinkers might also prove helpful to develop science. The whole idea of evolution, for instance, is associated with the idea of a linear development and progress typical for the Judeo-Christian tradition, for instance (Lazcano 2017a, p. 311). Likewise, metabolism as a more general approximation to the concept of the breath of life is probably a justified observation to stick to.

      What is life? Do we really know? The way to define life as long as we did not know how it functions was to describe the conglomerate of attributes which characterize it. A similar approach led to describing water according to its properties – like “being wet, transparent, odorless, tasteless, thirst quenching, and a good solvent”, which was a helpful approximation until we found out its H2O structure, which is the scientifically most informative answer to define water today (Cleland and Chyba 2010, p. 326).

      Similar, a (1) physiological approach to define life, long-time popular, describing life according to all of its functions – like eating, metabolizing, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and being responsive to external stimuli – was a first approximation, but is less in use today, as “such properties are either present in machines that nobody is willing to call alive, or absent from organisms that everybody is willing to call alive” (Sagan 2010, p. 303). Automobiles share too many of these properties of the “living” and are certainly not alive. Also, some obviously living bacteria do not breathe at all.

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