1. Life is often thought of and analysed from the viewpoint of the individual organism. In a previous post (The Apparent Complexity in Life’s Evolution and Its Explanation ), I suggested defining life as a process rather than an organism, therefore clarifying tricky areas such as viruses and their status of being alive or not, and other life products that may be alive in some situations that are very conditional e.g. seeds. In attempting to explain life from the viewpoint of the individual organism, the basic function of life appears to be survival of the organism. There have been plenty of discussions over the fundamental unit of life in the context of evolution, that have suggested various “vehicles” of life information including genes themselves, species, populations (Jablonka and Lamb, 2006), etc. The issue of course with this viewpoint is that organisms always die. Life clearly has no interest whatsoever in the actual survival of any given organism into infinity by
Insights into the applications of evolutionary theory to humans today. +more!