Month: December 2020

Life? – after physics, before biology, and fallen through the cracks

After not having written throughout this year, I will take the chance for a quick summary of my own path in the philosophy of biology as a condensation of what this blog aims for. A core issue that I see is that our current paradigm has a naive view of the nature of life. Whatever life is has been reduced to a living thing or better, the collection of living things. But what is a living thing? No such concept comes out of physics in its terms of mass, length, time, and forces. But biology is just as clueless; so evolutionary theory conveniently begins with the first living thing, presumably a first cell, or maybe a collection of protocells in what amounts to undefined almost living things. This is astounding when put in context. Many people today get excited about the “mysteries” at the edge of physics such as dark matter or string theory, but why is life not a much more important mystery as we are of it and it is all around us? While science has generally been considered to be mature and to have done a formidable job of