Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth
From www.sciencealert.com
2021-08-17 18:02:52
Excerpt:
….biologist Chris Kempes and complex systems researcher David Krakauer from Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico have posed the idea that our focus on evolution as a driving force of life may have “blinded us to additional general principles of life”.
To explore this, the researchers broaden the definition of “life” to the union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time.
Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself.
“Human culture lives on the material of minds, much like multicellular organisms live on the material of single-celled organisms,” Kempes explains.
Based on their new definition, the researchers argue that life has emerged many times on Earth, and that we in fact are co-existing with many forms of current life.
