People have tried to find more general, more universal definitions of life.
They're speculative, because we don't know about any life other than ourselves.
But one definition that I kind of like says life is a system that's capable of
Darwinian evolution. What does it require to have a system that evolves in a
Darwinian fashion? First, you have to be able to reproduce and make more of
yourself, so that fits with our local definition. You also need a source of
variation so that all of the new generation is not identical either to the
previous generation or to all its brothers and sisters. And once you have that
variation, then natural selection can actually select, by either differential
birth or death, some of the variants that function best. That may turn out to
be a fairly general definition of life wherever we might find it.
written by B.Zakhour
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