Calling Life Into Question

Ferris Jabr explains how he’s come to the conclusion that “life does not actually exist”:

Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.

Jabr isn’t alone in this line of thinking:

I nervously explained these ideas to [Scripps Research Institute researcher Gerald] Joyce on the phone, anticipating that he would laugh and tell me they were absurd. After all, this is someone who helped NASA define life. But Joyce said the argument that life is a concept is “perfect.” He agrees that the mission to define life is, in some ways, futile. The working definition was really just a linguistic convenience. “We were trying to help NASA find extraterrestrial life,” he says. “We couldn’t use the word ‘life’ in every paragraph and not define it.”

Carol Cleland, a philosopher at the University of Colorado Boulder who has spent years researching attempts to deliniate life, also thinks that the instinct to precisely define life is misguided—but she is not yet ready to deny life’s physical reality. “It’s just as premature to reach the conclusion that there is no intrinsic nature to life as it is to define life,” she says. “I think the best attitude is to treat what are normally taken as the definitive criteria of life as tentative criteria.”