life

life, living matter and, as such, matter that shows certain attributes that include responsiveness, growth, metabolism, energy transformation, and reproduction. Although a noun, as with other defined entities, the word life might be better cast as a verb to reflect its essential status as a process. Life comprises individuals, living beings, assignable to groups (taxa). Each individual is composed of one or more minimal living units, called cells, and is capable of transformation of carbon-based and other compounds (metabolism), growth, and participation in reproductive acts. Life-forms present on Earth today have evolved from ancient common ancestors through the generation of hereditary variation and natural selection. Although some studies state that life may have begun as early as 4.1 billion years ago, it can be traced to fossils dated to 3.5–3.7 billion years ago, which is still only slightly younger than Earth, which gravitationally accreted into a planet about 4.5 billion years ago. But this is life as a whole. More than 99.9 percent of species that have ever lived are extinct. The several branches of science that reveal the common historical, functional, and chemical basis of the evolution of all life include electron microscopy, genetics, paleobiology (including paleontology), and molecular biology.

The phenomenon of life can be approached in several ways: life as it is known and studied on planet Earth; life imaginable in principle; and life, by hypothesis, that might exist elsewhere in the universe (see extraterrestrial life). As far as is known, life exists only on Earth. Most life-forms reside in a thin sphere that extends about 23 km (14 miles) from 3 km (2 miles) beneath the bottom of the ocean to the top of the troposphere (lower atmosphere); the relative thickness is comparable to a coat of paint on a rubber ball. An estimated 10–30 million distinguishable species currently inhabit this sphere of life, or biosphere.

Definitions of life

Much is known about life from points of view reflected in the various biological, or “life,” sciences. These include anatomy (the study of form at the visible level), ultrastructure (the study of form at the microscopic level), physiology (the study of function), molecular biology and biochemistry (the study of form and function at chemical levels), ecology (the study of the relations of organisms with their environments), taxonomy (the naming, identifying, and classifying of organisms), ethology (the study of animal behaviour), and sociobiology (the study of social behaviour). Specific sciences that participate in the study of life focus more narrowly on certain taxa or levels of observation—e.g., botany (the study of plants), lichenology (the study of lichens, leafy or crusty individuals composed of permanent associations between algae or photosynthetic bacteria and fungi), herpetology (the study of amphibians and reptiles), microbiology (the study of bacteria, yeast, and other unicellular fungi, archaea, protists, viruses), zoology (the study of marine and land animals), and cytology (the study of cells). Although the scientists, technicians, and others who participate in studies of life easily distinguish living matter from inert or dead matter, none can give a completely inclusive, concise definition of life itself. Part of the problem is that the core properties of life—growth, change, reproduction, active resistance to external perturbation, and evolution—involve transformation or the capacity for transformation. Living processes are thus antithetical to a desire for tidy classification or final definition. To take one example, the number of chemical elements involved with life has increased with time; an exhaustive list of the material constituents of life would therefore be premature. Nonetheless, most scientists implicitly use one or more of the metabolic, physiological, biochemical, genetic, thermodynamic, and autopoietic definitions given below.

Metabolic

Metabolic definitions are popular with biochemists and some biologists. Living systems are objects with definite boundaries, continually exchanging some materials with their surroundings but without altering their general properties, at least over some period of time. However, there are exceptions. There are frozen seeds and spores that remain, so far as is known, perfectly dormant. At low temperatures they lack metabolic activity for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years but revive perfectly well upon being subjected to more clement conditions. A candle flame has a well-defined shape with a fixed boundary and is maintained by “metabolizing” its organic waxes and the surrounding molecular oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water. Similar reactions, incidentally, occur in animals and plants. Flames also have a well-known capacity for growth. These facts underscore the inadequacy of this metabolic definition, even as they suggest the indispensable role of energy transformation to living systems. (See metabolism.)

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Physiological

Physiological definitions of life are popular. Life is defined as any system capable of performing functions such as eating, metabolizing, excreting, breathing, moving, growing, reproducing, and responding to external stimuli. But many such properties are either present in machines that nobody is willing to call alive or absent from organisms, such as the dormant hard-covered seed of a tree, that everybody is willing to call alive. An automobile, for example, can be said to eat, metabolize, excrete, breathe, move, and be responsive to external stimuli. A visitor from another planet, judging from the enormous number of automobiles on Earth and the way in which cities and landscapes have been designed for the special benefit of motorcars, might well believe that automobiles are not only alive but are the dominant life-form on the planet. (See physiology.)

Biochemical

A biochemical or molecular biological definition sees living organisms as systems that contain reproducible hereditary information coded in nucleic acid molecules and that metabolize by controlling the rate of chemical reactions using the proteinaceous catalysts known as enzymes. In many respects, this is more satisfying than the physiological or metabolic definitions of life. However, even here there are counterexamples. Viruslike agents called prions lack nucleic acids, although the nucleic acids of the animal cells in which they reside may be involved in their reproduction. Ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules may replicate, mutate, and then replicate their mutations in test tubes, although by themselves they are not alive. Furthermore, a definition strictly in chemical terms seems peculiarly vulnerable. It implies that, were a person able to construct a system that had all the functional properties of life, it would still not be alive if it lacked the molecules that earthly biologists are fond of—and made of. (See biochemistry.)

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