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Showing posts from December, 2015

Life: survival versus reproduction

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

The Apparent Complexity in Life’s Evolution and Its Explanation

1. What is to be defined as life? Life is a process rather than an organism 2. In thinking about life’s evolution, apparent directionality towards complexity has been noted, at the same time as the apparent contradiction of simple life still existing alongside; this is the “Why do monkeys still exist?” conundrum. What is this apparent direction towards higher complexity, what’s behind it, is it evidence of God, is it evidence of anything at all? Life’s evolution and apparent tendency towards complexity is, I propose, simply a function of time and nothing else. Life does not exist in a vacuum or in abstract. Life, as a process distinct from non-life processes, takes place in a non-life environment and must be tightly connected to it. We see this most evidently in the form of life’s “adaptations” to its environments. Therefore, life is indeed a mirror, or a complement, of all else. All else, in a general sense, is the universe itself. Don’t ask about that – that’s a whole diff