What is Life?

By Conselleria de Medi Ambient, from Wikimedia Commons.

No doubt about it: Life is truly amazing. I mean, the things it gets up to far exceed our imaginations! (Just watch a few dozen Ze Frank “True Facts” videos to scratch the surface.) It hardly seems necessary to invest in a post to elucidate what constitutes Life, when a small child will correctly identify instances almost every time. Living beings demonstrate awareness about their surroundings, taking actions broadly in service of goals to thrive and reproduce. An amoeba marks itself as alive because we witness its purposeful mobility to secure food and evade danger.

Yet, living beings are undeniably made of atoms—atoms that do not appear in any close investigation to operate outside the usual rules of physics. Our sensation of awareness, experience of color perception, etc. seems so far removed from physics that the intractable connection is obvious to neither child nor adult. How could this awareness (what we label “consciousness”) possibly arise out of inanimate particles obeying physics without some “special sauce” unavailable to mere “machines” like computers or robots? It seems prima facie absurd, so it requires an unusual suspension of disbelief to submit to the baffling prospect.

How is it even possible, though, that inanimate matter can constitute Life? In a word: feedback. Life is feedback. The sun is of huge importance to Life, but we would not say that it is alive itself even though it actively engages with the universe and is a critical contributor to living beings on Earth. It’s continuance as a star is not contingent on these interactions. No feedback loop makes fusion in the core care what happens in Las Vegas. As an aside, I resist dividing lines and include the Sun (and everything else) in a living whole: just try doing without it!

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Rivulets of Life

Rivulets; photo by Tom Murphy: CC-BY-NC.

I spend probably too much of my time (and now yours) trying to work out the apparent differences between animate and inanimate arrangements of atoms. In practice it’s not at all hard to tell one from the other, even if a mass spectrometer would confirm that all the same atoms comprise the collections. Children easily differentiate one from the other. Isn’t that definitive?

In a similar vein, it’s not hard to tell a star from a brown dwarf, even though they have essentially identical compositions. The one having more than 8% the mass of our sun will ignite fusion and light up, while the one not “tall enough to go on the ride” will continue sulking as a dim, warm lump.

It’s not hard to tell the difference in behavior between a piece of paper fluttering to the floor and the exact same piece wadded tightly and dropping straight down. A clear sheet of glass or ice becomes an opaque white powder simply by crushing it thoroughly. A log looks and acts much differently before and after burning, even though no atoms were created or destroyed—most are dispersed as invisible gas. Arrangement matters.

But I want to poke a little deeper and identify an arrangement that we would never call animate, yet displays many of the hallmarks of Life. This is my clumsy attempt at doing so. The purpose is not to find an exact match in this example, because that’s impossible: identifying flaws is easy sport. Rather, this exercise provides a window that might allow our crippled imaginations to dimly grasp how Life might develop behaviors that appear purposeful in the context of evolutionary feedback. So, instead of focusing on imperfections, the challenge is: are you able to make out the shape beyond the distracting foreground fog? What new insights does this perspective offer? How might you build upon it and make it even better?

This is the first in a two-part series on what constitutes Life, as far as I can gather.

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Atomic Humans

Some themes appear to exert a magnetic pull on my attention: I keep coming back to them and often feel like I’m on a treadmill. It’s hard to figure out why: why am I compelled to keep these topics alive? A recent insight ties some of it together.

Years ago, I wrote a post called A Physics-based Diet Plan. The premise is that humans do not create or destroy atoms within their bodies, and that the energetics are too minuscule to register measurable mass–energy conversion. As such, a person’s mass change—as measured on a bathroom scale, for instance—from one day to the next is completely captured by the difference of mass inputs and mass outputs. It’s just atoms in and out.

Now, the human body has many channels for mass loss. Bathroom functions, breathing (net carbon/water loss really adds up!), and perspiration being the main mechanisms. Mass gain is almost entirely through our pie-holes. And entry via that channel is almost always facilitated by a hand delivering food to the mouth under the control of a brain. If you want to lose weight, the directive is simple: eat less and breathe more. In other words: diet and exercise. I know: radical, right? Every successful program for weight loss involves essentially this same advice, in various guises. That’s because it’s just atoms in every single case, at the foundational level. But oh boy, you wouldn’t believe the resistance I get to this framing. Let’s talk about that…

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How Much for One Protein?

Proteins are made of party ribbon curled by scissors. Image by CAChamblee via Wikimedia Commons.

Showing my age a bit, a young Chris Rock in a 1988 movie amusingly asks: “How much for one rib?” Given that the crafting of a single protein plays a central role in this post, and ribs are a source of protein, the association was too much for me to pass up in the title.

I’ve pointed out before that our most elaborate inventions absolutely pale in comparison to even the simplest form of Life. Our gizmos can’t self-replicate, heal wounds, feed themselves, stave off pathogens, or self-evolve. Even though both gadgets and Life appear to be based on atoms and the same fundamental interactions, the level of complexity in Life is far beyond our means to create. At best, we bootstrap and copy.

To make the point, we’ll embark on a well-funded thought experiment that is able to assemble the top talent from around the world in a team given one mission: generate the genetic coding that would carry out a specific novel function by way of synthesizing a novel protein specific to that task. We stipulate a novel function that hasn’t arisen in any lifeform, otherwise the open-book (Google-connected) nature of this test would instantly result in “cheating” off a billion-year heritage.

Let’s see how they do.

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Decisions, Decisions

Which way will the coin decide to land? Image by ICMA Photos.

In my continuing pursuit of humility as an antidote to modernity’s human supremacy illness, the atoms that constitute who I am take issue with lofty and self-aggrandizing concepts of idealism, dualism, and free will—replaced by the unflattering material world and its staggering wealth of emergent complexity. I have argued that opposite of lacking imagination and being reductionist, such a view far exceeds our imaginative capacity and is in fact rather expansive and open-ended next to facile short-cut cop-outs that sweep mind-boggling complexity under the rug by pretending that constructs like mind, consciousness, soul, God, or Santa Claus are real.

One stubborn sticking point is the beguiling illusion that “we” are separate from “our” corporeal bodies, owning and controlling them, somehow. This notion is prevalent, despite zero evidence that we are anything but corporeal, and heaps of evidence to the contrary. A less supremacist variant allows that all life, down to microbes, are endowed with this material override to exert control and autonomy over their environments, but still demand a line of separation between life and inanimate collections of matter. An amoeba suddenly changing course in reaction to its environment is, in this view, ontologically different than a hurricane changing course in reaction to its environment.

Granted, life is amazing and exhibits unambiguous behavioral differences compared to, say, rocks (hint: check the complexity of internal structure). A materialist, mechanistic basis does not in any way diminish life, although that’s often the regrettable reaction from someone who takes it on faith that transcendent mystery accounts for life’s splendor—rather than intuition-busting eons of emergent material fabulousness. Well, it turns out that life is incredible no matter what inconsequential thoughts we form about it. In any case, the point that I will develop in this post is that “decisions” are carried out at every level from electrons to ants, but are at no point fundamentally operating on a different basis.

Depending on how one defines “decisions,” either electrons and bats carry them out by the same rules, or neither can be said to be making “free” decisions. Whatever the case, electrons and bats are on similar footing when it comes to “decisions,” albeit at vastly different scales of complexity. Given enough information and background, the decisions by either are not surprising, even if not precisely predictable. Now, I do identify a difference between living decisions and inanimate decisions, importantly, but it’s a subtle one that I’ll wind my way toward.

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For the Love of Newts

Photo by author

Happy Newt Year! Those who have followed me for a long time have probably noticed a marked uptick in the frequency of newt mentions in the last few years. What’s the deal with that? It seems so random. Am I engaging in occult practices that require eye of newt?

The simplest version is that when I moved from San Diego back to the Pacific Northwest (had lived in Seattle prior to being “rented” by California for 18 years), I landed in newt territory.

My street is largely undeveloped, leaving plenty of forested critter habitat. A slow-moving creek—dammed by beavers into more of a pond—runs a few hundred meters away, which anchors the local newts. When it rains, especially in fall and spring, we find newts slowly prowling the area. Just as lost keys are more likely to be found under a lamp-post simply because light allows them to be seen, newts are frequently found on streets and driveways because they stand out on such plain surfaces. I suspect it goes deeper than this, in that they also hunt worms, which find their way onto pavement during the rain, and are also perhaps easier for the newts to spot. Rainy time is dinnertime!

I could never have predicted it a few years back, but my wife and I find ourselves smitten by the newts. We love and adore them. I hope this post provides at least a little appreciation as to why.

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Life Expectations

A while back, I came across a fascinating paper from 2007 by Gurven and Kaplan on longevity among hunter-gatherers that helped me understand aspects of what life was (and is) like outside of modernity. My interest is both a matter of pure curiosity, and to gain perspective on how desperate life feels—or doesn’t—to members of pre-agricultural (ecological) cultures.

I wrote last year about the perceived perils of early human life in Desperate Odds, in the context that to us members of modernity, having never been weened from the teat of agricultural output, it seems like life without agriculture (and supermarkets) would be a virtual death sentence. Add to this a perceived vulnerability to predation from lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), and the mental image that emerges—as depicted by Daniel Quinn in Ishmael—is of a stressed and starving hunter following the tracks of elusive prey as twilight darkens, while a predator is close on his trail, audibly breathing. It feels like a knife edge of survival: everything has to go just right, but teeters on all going horribly wrong.

The core argument from the Desperate Odds post was that surviving to reproductive age was obviously common, or our species would wink out. This simple fact makes daily survival a near-guarantee—enough so that fear of death is not top-of-mind most of the time, allowing most brain cycles to go toward less-troubled, routine activities.

It was either in preparing that post or in connection with A Lifetime Ago that I ran across the aforementioned paper. In this post, I dig in to see what insights can be gained from survival models for various human cultures.

The Attention-Grabber

Let’s start with the plot that caught my eye and drew me in, which is Figure 3 in the paper.

Figure 3 from motivating paper.

Let’s see if it draws you in as well.

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MM #17: Being Human

This is the seventeenth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. Here, I attempt to paint a picture of how we might think of ourselves as humans on this planet, as integral members of the community of life. If we’re good, evolution might keep us for a while—along with lots of friends currently in deep trouble.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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MM #5: Our Biological Inheritance

This is the fifth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode extends the point from Episode 3 that we owe almost everything to life that came before us. All our senses and capabilities are inherited. We would be nothing without our older brothers and sisters on this planet.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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MM #4: Evolution

This is the fourth of about 17 in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous episode afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode addresses the more subtle and under-appreciated aspects of evolution, which acts on the whole community of life in full ecological context.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Views: 1610