6 Answers

  1. There are no numbers of such definitions, but we must understand that biologists themselves do not really need them.

    The simplest, my favorite, is ” life is something to which the methods of biology are applicable.” I love it precisely because it emphasizes that biology itself does not need a definition of life, it will study everything to which it can extend its method and this is what we will continue to call life.

    Slightly more complex, but almost synonymous with the previous definition of NASA – ” self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” These definitions are synonymous because biology = evolutionary theory + biochemistry, biology can study what the laws derived from biology apply to, that is, biology can study what evolves and is based on chemistry.

    And a dozen more definitions: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Жизнь#Definitions

    In addition, the definition does not exist in isolation from what tasks it is intended to solve. The definition of life given in order to divide everything into what is studied by biology and what is not studied by biology will differ from the definition of life given in order to divide everything into what can be killed in the legal sense and what cannot be killed in the legal sense. The latter deals only with individual individuals (whereas according to the former, the RNA substrate is alive, in which individual RNA chains catalyze the synthesis of each other), and according to this definition, an embryo can (and almost everywhere does) fall out of the concept of living up to a certain age, as well as a person who has been diagnosed with brain death. Even if he can still “live” in a purely chemical sense, legally he is essentially dead and disconnecting him from the machine will not be murder if performed with all the formalities.

    If in the future full-fledged artificial intelligences are created that have a personality in the human sense of the word (or even at a lower level, at least higher animals), then such AI can be legally recognized as alive, although biologically they are not alive in any sense.

  2. I would describe life as a state of the system in which it is able to maintain its internal structure and reproduce itself at the expense of substances and environmental energy.

  3. I want to add to the answer of the user Nikita K.

    Properties of live content:

    – Unity of chemical composition

    – Metabolism and energy

    – Heredity

    -Self-reproduction (Reproduction)

    -Variability

    – Ability to grow and develop

    -Discreteness

    – Adaptability

    Do not write-Irritability, – Self-regulation and-Rhythm, because such functions are not available to all life forms on Earth.

  4. I don't know about biology, but life is the ability to independently counteract the destruction of the formed structure of matter. If there is no such ability, it is not life; if there is no such ability, it is death.

  5. Live is what:

    1) Eats

    2) Moving

    3) Multiplies

    Something may have changed since I graduated from high school, but that's how I was taught. In a biology textbook, this should be at the beginning. Where it explains what science studies.

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