From my biology notebook:

• Life as meaning creation: there is no such thing as “signal”, that is just how life interprets what is around it (check information notebook)
• Unit of life as greater internal cohesion than competition
  • Could countries be seen as units of life?

What is Life by Andy Pross

Basic argument is that life comes from stability of things. Specific term here is DKS (dynamic kinetic stability). If you look at definitions of life, they’re all lacking in some sense. After all, no human would be considered alive if reproducing on our own was a prerequisite to being alive.

His basic argument is that life is replicators that are able to become stable entities. (Note here that entities isn’t on an individual level but populations. I’m going to die some day, but Homo Sapiens as a group will still live on.)

I thought some of the more interesting parts were trying to formulate Darwin’s evolutionary principles as a higher-level theory and the underlying chemistry. If everything evolves towards greater stability, then life is just an extension of what is dynamically stable.

Why aren’t rocks life? They’re just a chemically stable state which don’t reproduce. It seems important at least from my reading that life is in a state which isn’t a state that would occur naturally from normal chemistry balancing of equations.

If life and the study of “living systems” is chemically studying things which are more chemically stable, then where does metabolism come into the picture? He argues that normal chemistry is like a car with no engine that can only move downwards. With metabolism, you add the engine back in and suddenly you are able to harvest nutrients and be more stable that you ever could’ve been before.

How complex is the simplest form of metabolism? How did metabolism arise? Could we evolve systems which learn to have metabolism? Is this really just a natural consequence of having chemical substrates where there are untapped sources of energy?