The essence of life revisited: how theories can shed light on it

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Abstract

Disagreement over whether life is inevitable when the conditions can support life remains unresolved, but calculations show that self-organization can arise naturally from purely random effects. Closure to efficient causation, or the need for all specific catalysts used by an organism to be produced internally, implies that a true model of an organism cannot exist, though this does not exclude the possibility that some characteristics can be simulated. Such simulations indicate that there is a limit to how small a self-organizing system can be: much smaller than a bacterial cell, but around the size of a typical virus particle. All current theories of life incorporate, at least implicitly, the idea of catalysis, but they largely ignore the need for metabolic regulation.

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Cornish-Bowden, A., & Cárdenas, M. L. (2022). The essence of life revisited: how theories can shed light on it. Theory in Biosciences, 141(2), 105–123. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-021-00342-w

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