Sara Walker: belief

Transcript context

…So what do you do with that in terms of when you try to define life? I think we have to get rid of the notion of an individual as being relevant. And this is really difficult because a lot of the ways that we think about life, like the fundamental unit of life is the cell, individuals are alive, but we don’t think about how gray that distinction is. So for example, you might consider self-reproduction to be the most defining feature of life. A lot of people do, actually. That’s one of these standard different definitions that a lot of people in my field like to use in astrobiology is life as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution, which I was once quoted as agreeing with, and I was really offended because I hate that definition. I think it’s terrible, and I think it’s terrible that people use it. I think every word in that definition is actually wrong as a descriptor of life. Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Why is that? That seems like a pretty good definition.…

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