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Why Life Does Not Really Exist

By Ferris Jabr | December 2, 2013 | 62
The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

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A native bee in my backyard (Credit: Ferris Jabr)

I have been fascinated with living things since childhood. Growing up in northern
California, I spent a lot of time playing outdoors among plants and animals. Some of my
friends and I would sneak up on bees as they pollinated flowers and trap them in Ziploc
bags so we could get a close look at their obsidian eyes and golden hairs before returning
the insects to their daily routines. Sometimes I would make crude bows and arrows from
bushes in my backyard, using stripped bark for string and leaves for fletchings. On
family trips to the beach I learned how to quickly dig crustaceans and arthropods out of
their hiding spots by watching for bubbles in the sand as the most recent wave retreated.
And I vividly recall an elementary school field trip to a grove of eucalyptus trees in Santa
Cruz, where thousands of migrating monarch butterflies had stopped to rest. They clung
to branches in great brown globs, resembling dead leavesuntil one stirred and
revealed the fiery orange inside of its wings.
Moments like thatalong with a number of David Attenborough television specials
intensified my enthrallment with the planets creatures. Whereas my younger brother

was obsessed with his KNex setmeticulously building elaborate roller coastersI
wanted to understand how our cat, well, worked. How did she see the world? Why did
she purr? What were fur and claws and whiskers made of? One Christmas I asked for an
encyclopedia of animals. After ripping the wrapping paper off a massive book that
probably weighed half as much as I did, I sat near the tree reading for hours. Not too
surprising, then, that I ended up writing about nature and science for a living.

A K'Nex contraption (Credit: Druyts.t via Wikimedia Commons)

Recently, however, I had an epiphany that has forced me to rethink why I love living
things so much and reexamine what life is, really. For as long as people have studied life
they have struggled to define it. Even today, scientists have no satisfactory or universally
accepted definition of life. While pondering this problem, I remembered my brothers
devotion to KNex roller coasters and my curiosity about the family cat. Why do we think
of the former as inanimate and the latter as alive? In the end, arent they both
machines? Granted, a cat is an incredibly complex machine capable of amazing
behaviors that a KNex set could probably never mimic. But on the most fundamental
level, what is the difference between an inanimate machine and a living one? Do people,
cats, plants and other creatures belong in one category and KNex, computers, stars and
rocks in another? My conclusion: No. In fact, I decided, life does not actually exist.
Allow me to elaborate.

Formal attempts to precisely define life date to at least the time of ancient Greek
philosophers. Aristotle believed that, unlike the inanimate, all living things have one of
three kinds of souls: vegetative souls, animal souls and rational souls, the last of which
belonged exclusively to humans. Greek anatomist Galen proposed a similar, organbased system of vital spirits in the lungs, blood and nervous system. In the 17th
century, German chemist George Erns Stahl and other researchers began to describe a
doctrine that would eventually become known as vitalism. Vitalists maintained that
living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they
contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are
inanimate things and that organic matter (molecules that contained carbon and
hydrogen and were produced by living things) could not arise from inorganic matter
(molecules lacking carbon that resulted primarily from geological processes).
Subsequent experiments revealed vitalism to be completely untruethe inorganic can
be converted into the organic both inside and outside the lab.
Instead of imbuing organisms with some non-physical element, other scientists
attempted to identify a specific set of physical properties that differentiated the living
from the nonliving. Today, in lieu of a succinct definition of life, Campbell and many
other widely used biology textbooks include a rather bloated list of such distinguishing
characteristics, for instance: order (the fact that many organisms are made from either a
single cell with different compartments and organelles or highly structured groups of
cells); growth and development (changing size and shape in a predictable manner);
homeostasis (maintaining an internal environment that differs from an external one,
such as the way cells regulate their pH levels and salt concentrations); metabolism
(expending energy to grow and to delay decay); reacting to stimuli (changing behavior in
response to light, temperature, chemicals or other aspects of the environment);
reproduction (cloning or mating to produce new organisms and transfer genetic
information from one generation to the next); and evolution (the change in the genetic
makeup of a population over time).

A tardigrade can survive without food or water in a dehyrated state for more than 10
years (Credit: Goldtsein lab via Wikimedia Commons via Flickr)
Its almost too easy to shred the logic of such lists. No one has ever managed to compile
a set of physical properties that unites all living things and excludes everything we label
inanimate. There are always exceptions. Most people do not consider crystals to be alive,
for example, yet they are highly organized and they grow. Fire, too, consumes energy
and gets bigger. In contrast, bacteria, tardigrades and even some crustaceans can enter
long periods of dormancy during which they are not growing, metabolizing or changing
at all, yet are not technically dead. How do we categorize a single leaf that has fallen
from a tree? Most people would agree that, when attached to a tree, a leaf is alive: its
many cells work tirelessly to turn sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into food, among
other duties. When a leaf detaches from a tree, its cells do not instantly cease their
activities. Does it die on the way to the ground; or when it hits the ground; or when all
its individual cells finally expire? If you pluck a leaf from a plant and keep its cells
nourished and happy inside a lab, is that life?
Such dilemmas plague just about every proposed feature of life. Responding to the
environment is not a talent limited to living organismswe have designed countless
machines that do just that. Even reproduction does not define a living thing. Many an
individual animal cannot reproduce on its own. So are two cats alive because they can
create new cats together, but a single cat is not alive because it cannot propagate its
genes by itself? Consider, also, the unusual case of turritopsis nutricula, the immortal
jellyfish, which can indefinitely alternate between its adult form and its juvenile stage. A

jelly vacillating in this way is not producing offspring, cloning itself or even aging in the
typical fashionyet most people would concede it remains alive.
But what about evolution? The ability to store information in molecules like DNA and
RNA, to pass on this information to ones offspring and to adapt to a changing
environment by altering genetic informationsurely these talents are unique to living
things. Many biologists have focused on evolution as lifes key distinguishing feature. In
the early 1990s, Gerald Joyce of the Scripps Research Institute was a member of an
advisory panel to John Rummel, manager of NASAs exobiology program at the time.
During discussions about how best to find life on other worlds, Joyce and his fellow
panelists came up with a widely cited working definition of life: a self-sustaining system
capable of Darwinian evolution. Its lucid, concise and comprehensive. But does it work?
Lets examine how this definition handles viruses, which have complicated the quest to
define life more than any other entity. Viruses are essentially strands of DNA or RNA
packaged inside a protein shell; they do not have cells or a metabolism, but they do have
genes and they can evolve. Joyce explains, however, that in order to be a self-sustaining
system, an organism must contain all the information necessary to reproduce and to
undergo Darwinian evolution. Because of this constraint, he argues that viruses do not
satisfy the working definition. After all, a virus must invade and hijack a cell in order to
make copies of itself. The viral genome only evolves in the context of the host cell,
Joyce said in a recent interview.

A cluster of bacteriophages, viruses that evolved to infect bacteria (Credit: Dr Graham

Beards via Wikimedia Commons)

When you really think about it, though, NASAs working definition of life is not able to
accommodate the ambiguity of viruses better than any other proposed definition. A
parasitic worm living inside a persons intestineswidely regarded as a detestable but
very real form of lifehas all the genetic information it needs to reproduce, but it would
never be able to do so without cells and molecules in the human gut from which it steals
the energy it needs to survive. Likewise, a virus has all the genetic information required
to replicate itself, but does not have all the requisite cellular machinery. Claiming that
the worms situation is categorically different from that of the virus is a tenuous
argument. Both the worm and virus reproduce and evolve only in the context of their
hosts. In fact, the virus is a much more efficient reproducer than the worm. Whereas the
virus gets right down to business and needs only a few proteins inside a cells nucleus to
initiate replication on a massive scale, the parasitic worms reproduction requires use of
an entire organ in another animal and will be successful only if the worm survives long
enough to feed, grow and lay eggs. So if we use NASAs working definition to banish
viruses from the realm of life, we must further exclude all manner of much larger
parasites including worms, fungi and plants.
Defining life as a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution also forces us to
admit that certain computer programs are alive. Genetic algorithms, for instance,
imitate natural selection to arrive at the optimal solution to a problem: they are bit
arrays that code traits, evolve, compete with one another to reproduce and even
exchange information. Similarly, software platforms like Avida create digital
organisms that are made up of digital bits that can mutate in much the same way DNA
mutates. In other words they, too, evolve. Avida is not a simulation of evolution; it is
an instance of it, Robert Pennock of Michigan State University told Carl
Zimmer in Discover. All the core parts of the Darwinian process are there. These things
replicate, they mutate, they are competing with one another. The very process of natural
selection is happening there. If thats central to the definition of life, then these things
count.
I would argue that Joyces own lab delivered another devastating blow to NASAs
working definition of life. He and many other scientists favor an origin of life story
known as the RNA world hypothesis. All life on our planet depends on DNA and RNA.
In modern living organisms, DNA stores the information necessary to build the proteins
and molecular machines that together form a bustling cell. At first, scientists thought
only proteins known as enzymes could catalyze the chemical reactions necessary to

construct this cellular machinery. In the 1980s, however, Thomas Cech and Sidney
Altman discovered that, in collaboration with various protein enzymes, many different
kinds of RNA enzymesor ribozymesread the information coded in DNA and build
the different parts of a cell piece by piece. The RNA world hypothesis posits that the
earliest organisms on the planet relied solely on RNA to perform all these tasksto both
store and use genetic informationwithout the help of DNA or an entourage of protein
enzymes.

A geothermal pool in Wyoming. Nearly four billion years ago, what we call life may have
first evolved in similar "warm little ponds," as Darwin put it. (Credit: Caleb Dorfman, via
Flickr)
Heres how it might have happened: Nearly four billion years ago, in Earths primordial
soup, free-floating nucleotidesthe building blocks of RNA and DNAlinked into
longer and longer chains, eventually producing ribozymes that were big enough and
complex enough to make new copies of themselves and thus had a much greater chance
of surviving than RNAs that could not reproduce. Simple self-assembling membranes
enveloped these early ribozymes, forming the first cells. In addition to making more
RNA, ribozymes may have joined nucleotides into chains of DNA; nucleotides may have
spontaneously formed DNA as well. Either way, DNA replaced RNA as the main
information-storing molecule because it was more stable. And proteins took on many
catalytic roles because they were so versatile and diverse. But the cells of modern
organisms still contain what are likely remnants of the original RNA world. The
ribosome, for examplea bundle of RNA and proteins that builds proteins one amino
acid at a timeis a ribozyme. Theres also a group of viruses that use RNA as their
primary genetic material

To test the RNA world hypothesis, Joyce and other researchers have tried to create the
types of self-replicating ribozymes that may have once existed in the planets primordial
soup. In the mid-2000s, Joyce and Tracey Lincoln constructed trillions of random freefloating RNA sequences in the lab, similar to the early RNAs that may have competed
with one another billions of years ago, and isolated sequences that, by chance, were
capable of bonding two other pieces of RNA. By pitting these sequences against one
another, the pair eventually produced two ribozymes that could replicate one another ad
infinitum as long as they were supplied with sufficient nucleotides. Not only can these
naked RNA molecules reproduce, they can also mutate and evolve. The ribozymes have
altered small segments of their genetic code to adapt to fluctuating environmental
conditions, for example.
They meet the working definition of life, Joyce says. Its self-sustaining Darwinian
evolution. But he hesitates to say that the ribozymes are truly alive. Before he goes all
Dr. Frankenstein, he wants to see his creation innovate a completely new behavior, not
just modify something it can already do. I think whats missing is that it needs to be
inventive, needs to come up with new solutions, he says.
But I dont think Joyce is giving the ribozymes enough credit. Evolution is a change in
genes over time; one does not need to witness pigs sprouting wings or RNAs assembling
into the letters of the alphabet to see evolution at work. The advent of blue eye
color between 6,000 and 10,000 years agosimply another variation of iris pigments
is just as legitimate an example of evolution as the first feathered dinosaurs. If we define
life as a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution, I cannot see any
legitimate reason to deny self-replicating ribozymes or viruses the moniker of life. But I
do see a reason to ditch this working definition and all other definitions of life
altogether.
Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers
failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly
separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a
concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an
arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an
immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate
as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of
complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below
it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at

which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between

the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life
because there was never anything to define in the first place.
I nervously explained these ideas to Joyce on the phone, anticipating that he would
laugh and tell me they were absurd. After all, this is someone who helped NASA define
life. But Joyce said the argument that life is a concept is perfect. He agrees that the
mission to define life is, in some ways, futile. The working definition was really just a
linguistic convenience. We were trying to help NASA find extraterrestrial life, he says.
We couldnt use the word life in every paragraph and not define it.
Carol Cleland, a philosopher at the University of Colorado Boulder who has spent years
researching attempts to deliniate life, also thinks that the instinct to precisely define life
is misguidedbut she is not yet ready to deny lifes physical reality. Its just as
premature to reach the conclusion that there is no intrinsic nature to life as it is to define
life, she says. I think the best attitude is to treat what are normally taken as the
definitive criteria of life as tentative criteria.

A photo taken with an electron scanning microscope of the ALH 84001 meteorite, which
supposedly formed on Mars 4 billion years ago before eventually reaching Earth. A
handful of scientists think the chain-like structures in the photo are fossilized Martian
nanobacteria, but most researchers are skeptical (Credit: NASA, via Wikimedia
Commons)
What we really need, Cleland has written, is a well-confirmed, adequately general
theory of life. She draws an analogy to chemists in the sixteenth century. Before
scientists understood that air, dirt, acids and all chemical substances were made of
molecules, they struggled to define water. They could list its propertiesit was wet,

transparent, tasteless, freezable and it could dissolve many other substancesbut they
could not precisely characterize it until researchers discovered that water is two
hydrogen atoms bonded to an oxygen atom. Whether salty, muddy, dyed, liquid or
frozen, water is always H20; it may have other elements mixed in, but the tripartite
molecules that make what we call water water are always there. Nitric acid may
resemble water, but it is not water because the two substances have different molecular
structures. Creating the equivalent of molecular theory for life, Cleland says, will require
a larger sample size. She argues that, so far, we have only one example of what life is
the DNA and RNA-based life on Earth. Imagine trying to create a theory about
mammals by observing only zebras. Thats the situation we find ourselves in when trying
to identify what makes life life, Cleland concludes.
I disagree. Discovering examples of alien life on other planets would undoubtedly
expand our understanding of how the things we call living organisms work and how they
evolved in the first place, but such discoveries would probably not help us formulate a
revolutionary new theory of life. Sixteenth century chemists could not pinpoint what
distinguished water from other substances because they did not understand its
fundamental nature: they did not know that every substance was made of a specific
arrangement of molecules. In contrast, modern scientists know exactly what the
creatures on our planet are made ofcells, proteins, DNA and RNA. What differentiates
molecules of water, rocks, and silverware from cats, people and other living things is not
life, but complexity. Scientists already have sufficient knowledge to explain why what
we have dubbed organisms can in general do things that most of what we call inanimate
cannotto explain how bacteria make new copies of themselves and quickly adapt to
their environment, and why rocks do notwithout proclaiming that life is this and nonlife that and never the twain shall meet.
Recognizing life as a concept in no way robs what we call life of its splendor. Its not that
theres no material difference between living things and the inanimate; rather, we will
never find some clean dividing line between the two because the notion of life and nonlife as distinct categories is just thata notion, not a reality. Everything about living
creatures that fascinated me as a boy are equally wondrous to me now, even with my
new understanding of life. I think what truly unites the things we say are alive is not any
property intrinsic to those things themselves; rather, it is our perception of them, our
love of them andfranklyour hubris and narcissism.

First, we announced that everything on Earth could be separated into two groupsthe
animate and inanimateand it is no secret which one we think is superior. Then, not
only did we place ourselves in the first group, we further insisted on measuring all other
life forms on the planet against ourselves. The more similar something is to usthe
more it appears to move, talk, feel, thinkthe more alive it is to us, even though the
particular set of attributes that makes a human a human is clearly not the only way (or,
in evolutionary terms, even the most successful way) to go about being a living thing.

Our late family cat, Jasmine (Credit: Jabr family)

Truthfully, that which we call life is impossible without and inseparable from what we
regard as inanimate. If we could somehow see the underlying reality of our planetto
comprehend its structure on every scale simultaneously, from the microscopic to the
macroscopicwe would see the world in innumerable grains of sand, a giant quivering
sphere of atoms. Just as one can mold thousands of practically identical grains of sand
on a beach into castles, mermaids or whatever one can imagine, the innumerable atoms
that make up everything on the planet continually congregate and disassemble
themselves, creating a ceaselessly shifting kaleidoscope of matter. Some of those flocks
of particles would be what we have named mountains, oceans and clouds; others trees,
fish and birds. Some would be relatively inert; others would be changing at
inconceivable speed in bafflingly complex ways. Some would be roller coasters and
others cats.