Mar 20, 2023 03:59 AM
(This post was last modified: Mar 20, 2023 04:22 AM by C C.)
https://www.vox.com/unexplainable/236375...dont-agree
INTRO: We know life when we see it. Flying birds are clearly alive, as are microscopic creatures like tardigrades that scurry around in a single drop of water. But do we, humans, know what life fundamentally is? No.
“No one has been able to define life, and some people will tell you it’s not possible to,” says New York Times columnist and science reporter Carl Zimmer on Unexplainable — Vox’s podcast that explores big mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown.
It’s not for a lack of trying. “There are hundreds, hundreds of definitions of life that scientists themselves have published in the scientific literature,” says Zimmer, who wrote about them in his book Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. They include everything from simple definitions like “Life is a metabolic network within a boundary” to sentences that seem to require a PhD to decipher: “Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last common universal ancestor and includes all its descendants.”
There’s no consensus definition, but still the question teases us. It feels like it should be easy, something a fifth grader ought to be able to answer for science homework.
“It does feel like it should be easy because we feel it,” Zimmer says. “Our brains are actually tuned to recognizing things like biological motion. We’re sort of hardwired for recognizing life. But that doesn’t actually mean that we know what it is.”
But it still might be essential to answer. “Like imagine astronomers not agreeing on the definition of a star,” Zimmer says. “But this is even more fundamental. This is life.” The problem is, for every definition of life, there’s a creature or perplexing life-like entity that just sends us right back to the drawing board.
I spoke to Zimmer about why it has been so damn hard to define life, and whether it might not be possible to define it at all. This conversation is pulled from the third episode in a series all about how life began on Earth. Check out the whole series here..... (MORE - details, the discussion)
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While the video below is a (Yale University) interview of Carl Zimmer and his book, it is not related to the conversation above and its associated podcast.
https://youtu.be/VyKsp5U9FFw
Life’s Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive, with Carl Zimmer
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/VyKsp5U9FFw
INTRO: We know life when we see it. Flying birds are clearly alive, as are microscopic creatures like tardigrades that scurry around in a single drop of water. But do we, humans, know what life fundamentally is? No.
“No one has been able to define life, and some people will tell you it’s not possible to,” says New York Times columnist and science reporter Carl Zimmer on Unexplainable — Vox’s podcast that explores big mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown.
It’s not for a lack of trying. “There are hundreds, hundreds of definitions of life that scientists themselves have published in the scientific literature,” says Zimmer, who wrote about them in his book Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. They include everything from simple definitions like “Life is a metabolic network within a boundary” to sentences that seem to require a PhD to decipher: “Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last common universal ancestor and includes all its descendants.”
There’s no consensus definition, but still the question teases us. It feels like it should be easy, something a fifth grader ought to be able to answer for science homework.
“It does feel like it should be easy because we feel it,” Zimmer says. “Our brains are actually tuned to recognizing things like biological motion. We’re sort of hardwired for recognizing life. But that doesn’t actually mean that we know what it is.”
But it still might be essential to answer. “Like imagine astronomers not agreeing on the definition of a star,” Zimmer says. “But this is even more fundamental. This is life.” The problem is, for every definition of life, there’s a creature or perplexing life-like entity that just sends us right back to the drawing board.
I spoke to Zimmer about why it has been so damn hard to define life, and whether it might not be possible to define it at all. This conversation is pulled from the third episode in a series all about how life began on Earth. Check out the whole series here..... (MORE - details, the discussion)
- - - - - - - - - -
While the video below is a (Yale University) interview of Carl Zimmer and his book, it is not related to the conversation above and its associated podcast.
https://youtu.be/VyKsp5U9FFw
Life’s Edge: The Search for What it Means to be Alive, with Carl Zimmer
