Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman, but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a 'beautiful and important book' by 'a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discussions'. It appears here together with Mind and Matter, his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Schrodinger asks what place consciousness occupies in the evolution of life, and what part the state of development of the human mind plays in moral questions. Brought together with these two classics are Schrödinger's autobiographical sketches, published and translated here for the first time. They offer a fascinating fragmentary account of his life as a background to his scientific writings, making this volume a valuable additon to the shelves of scientist and layman alike.
For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into 14 themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields.
Schrodinger What Is Life Epub Downloads
One of the central aims of synthetic biology (SB) is to better understand the mechanisms of life by trying to develop and synthesize new forms and perhaps modes of life. While the question of what is life has occupied mankind for centuries, there is a lack of empirical research examining the basic concepts of life scientists within SB themselves refer to and build on. In order to gain insights into these fundamental concepts, we conducted a qualitative interview study with scientists working in the field of SB. The aim was to gain a better understanding of the underlying understandings, principles, and characteristics of (synthetic) life on the one hand, and the entangled consequences for the conducted experiments and studies as well as the pursued scientific approaches. We identified four primarily underlying basic concepts of life which serve as a fundamental framework for current and further scientific research within SB and have implications for research questions, approaches and aims as well as for the evaluation of scientific results.
The respondent refers to both the subjectively and socio-culturally shaped perception of what is called living and non-living, stressing that we are hardly able to establish an objective classification of both modes of existence based on generalized characteristic features met by living entities. Thus, in contrast to the second analyzed conception of life, within this conception it is not perceived as impossible to draw a line between living and non-living matter due to fluent transitions and the processuality of life (and hence due to the qualities of empirical objects themselves), but rather to the assumed fact that any distinction relies on subjective and societal ascriptions. This also implies that drawing the line between living and non-living objects can be considered a process of (social) negotiation involving the possibility of shifting boundaries between both modes of existing based on new scientific findings or the development of novel synthetic organisms.
If I ask myself what life is, that is another matter than if I ask what artificial life is with an emphasis on artificial. If I say, well, when it proliferates then I simply call it life, the next question is if it is really artificial or actually only something already existing that has been recreated in a cut-down form. (interviewee 3)
Within the third conception, life is defined as a hitherto undiscovered general principle emerging from the interactions between the different properties of living organisms. This concept addresses the following research questions in particular: how can we describe the overarching, structuring principle determining all forms of living matter (by means of a formula)? At what point or state of interaction(s) between certain properties does the assumed specific increase of complexity from which all forms of living necessarily result happen? Hence, the task is not primarily to (re-)construct single biological and physical properties, but rather to examine how they interact with each other in order to discover the emerging basic physical law underlying all forms of living matter and thereby generate synthetic forms of living from scratch. This implies the evaluation that research activities within SB are going beyond manipulating nature and will provide far-reaching new insights about the characteristics and principles of all existing forms of living matter and life itself, enabling the generation of synthetic life as a future research aim. In line with that, future objects constructed by means of SB are considered to be living matter, implying the ascription of an equal normative status compared with non-synthetical organisms.
Researchers grouped under the fourth conception formulate life as a relational, intuitive concept depending on subjective and societally shaped views. They focus on research questions from a very fundamental perspective, asking e.g.: what are possible forms and modes of living matter (even beyond the already known)? How do relational, subjective and social perceptions shape our understanding of living matter and limit our perspective on life as a universal category? Accordingly, there are various possible domains and manners to realize the construction of synthetic forms of living matter, implying that the first general task for synthetic biologists is to distance themselves from common perceptions of life and traditional research practices. The underlying research aim is neither to provide an explanation of the principles of life by means of a formula (as within the third conception) nor to identify the properties shared by all forms of living (as within the first conception) but rather to provide insights about characteristics of specific existing as well as novel forms of living. Research activities within SB are thus labeled as a mix of imitating nature and constructing from scratch, with both based upon subjective judgements. However, developments within SB might modify familiar understandings of living matter and life itself by evoking new subjective as well as socially shaped ascriptions, which also applies with regard to the prospective normative evaluation of novel beings. 2ff7e9595c
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