5/10/2023 0 Comments Life by life![]() ![]() In the early 1990s, an advisory panel to NASA's astrobiology program, which included biochemist Gerald Joyce, came up with a working definition: Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Adaptability is shared by all life on Earth, which explains why NASA used it as the basis for a definition that might work in helping to identify life on other planets. ![]() ![]() An alternative approach is to use the theory considered to be a defining feature of life: Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the process that gives life the ability to adapt to its environment. Are entities such as viruses really life-forms, or merely life-like? Using a list definition, that largely depends on the criteria you choose to include, which is mostly arbitrary. ![]()
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