Chapter 1 - Life

What is life? People have asked this question throughout the ages without ever really nailing it down. Feeding, finding and reproduction is a good definition for the lay person, but what about a mule, it is definitely alive but it does not reproduce. The blue collar layperson would say feeding, finding and fucking. This makes the mule alive? The motivation to try being the deciding factor.

Perhaps we are asking the question in the wrong way. While a bacterial cell is "comfortably alive" and fire, which although reproduces, is "comfortably dead", a virus sits up high on the fence and mocks our feeble intelligence. We want a world where we can say that this thing is alive and this other thing is dead, we want a sharp shadow between light and darkness. But walk in the wilderness and nature tells another story.

You can be in the midst of a meadow and the sun shines brightly upon you and here is the light. Then you walk among the trees and the light flickers upon you, darkness/light/darkness/light all in the blink of an eye, then you can be in constant shade and finally in constant darkness.

You turn around to head back to the light and you see a rotten tree trunk. Is that alive? Well of course not, right? When did the tree trunk die?, take a healthy growing tree. This is alive, it begins to reach the end of its lifespan, day by day getting weaker. Day by day opportunistic fungi, bacteria and microbes infiltrate the trunk. Finally the tree dies. But the trunk isn't dead. In fact for a time, the amount of genetic information within the trunk is increasing as the number of decomposer organisms multiply within it. The actual number of living cells, bacterial cells being smaller than the tree cells, is increasing as well. By the time the trunk is well and truly dead there is nothing left of it to be called dead.

The whole problem with the question of life and death is mainly a product of human thinking. People want to classify objects as being in one state or the other. As Einstein once said, things should be kept as simple as possible, but no simpler. Unfortunately for us Einstein was born billions of years after life first stirred on Earth.

I would like to define life as competing patterns of information that seek to impose order on its environment. The turbulence of entropy. The shape, size and composition of the tree was defined by the trees genetic information and also, to a lesser extent, by its environment and its symbionts. When the tree died the trunk is no longer competing against the decomposer organisms that are breaking it down. It is simply a punch bag, in some cases a very strong punch bag, but it invariably succumbs.