, Laze pri Borovnici 38, 1353 Borovnica, Slovenia.
Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Maribor, Koroška cesta 160, 2000, Maribor, Slovenia.
Orig Life Evol Biosph. 2019 Jun;49(1-2):77-88. doi: 10.1007/s11084-019-09578-5. Epub 2019 Jun 20.
A new definition of life is proposed and discussed in the present article. It is formulated by modifying and extending NASA's working definition of life, which postulates that life is a "self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution". The new definition includes a thermodynamical aspect of life as a far from equilibrium system and considers the flow of information from the environment to the living system. In our derivation of the definition of life we have assumed the hypothesis, that during the emergence of life evolution had to first involve autocatalytic systems that only subsequently acquired the capacity of genetic heredity. The new proposed definition of life is independent of the mode of evolution, regardless of whether Lamarckian or Darwinian evolution operated at the origins of life and throughout evolutionary history. The new definition of life presented herein is formulated in a minimal manner and it is general enough that it does not distinguish between individual (metabolic) network and the collective (ecological) one. The newly proposed definition of life may be of interest for astrobiology, research into the origins of life or for efforts to produce synthetic or artificial life, and it furthermore may also have implications in the cognitive and computer sciences.
本文提出并讨论了一个新的生命定义。它是通过修改和扩展 NASA 的生命工作定义而制定的，该定义假设生命是一种“能够进行达尔文进化的自我维持的化学系统”。新的定义包括生命作为远离平衡系统的热力学方面，并考虑了信息流从环境到生命系统的流动。在我们对生命定义的推导中，我们假设了一个假设，即在生命出现的过程中，进化必须首先涉及到自催化系统，而这些系统随后才获得了遗传遗传的能力。本文提出的新生命定义独立于进化模式，无论拉马克式进化还是达尔文式进化在生命起源和整个进化历史中起作用。本文提出的新生命定义以最小的方式制定，它足够通用，不会区分个体（代谢）网络和集体（生态）网络。新提出的生命定义可能对天体生物学、生命起源研究或生产合成或人工生命的努力感兴趣，并且它可能在认知和计算机科学中也具有意义。
