From Colin Cook
Further to cosmologist Charley Lineweaver’s attempt to widen the definition of life, could the universe or Earth be considered to be living things (19 May, p 29)?
This would depend on whether the universe is a fully integrated entity or just a collection of organised matter ensembles, one of which (Earth) contains smaller ensembles that are certainly alive.
Similarly, Earth could be considered alive if it is deemed to be self-regulating to maintain its millions of species – as the Gaia hypothesis suggests.
From Mike Jaket
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Defining life as “anything that undergoes Darwinian evolution” infers constituent processes that give a steady structure, reproduction and so on, while not being too prescriptive.
The overall process doesn’t include a fixed “evolutionary unit” that a cosmologist could search for. So, contrary to Lineweaver’s view, a Darwinian approach doesn’t invalidate the definition in any way.
You could tighten it to “DNA-encoded forms that undergo Darwinian evolution”, but then that may well be incorrect in the wider universe.
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