Life's Edge
Largely scientific examinations of what life is and how it came to be.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2021–2024years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There’s a book called Life’s Edge by Carl Zimmer[0] that’s similar to this article but gets deeply into the history of various explorations of the concept of “life” as well as issues that come up around it (eg organ donation) and what it means. It’s worth checking out if you liked this article.
- Related to is the question of what it means for something to be alive. Carl Zimmer’s “Life’s Edge” is an interesting read
- There is a whole genre of these, starting with (as mentioned in the paper's introduction) "What is Life?" by Schrodinger. I've been idly working my way through a bunch of them, including Monod's "Chance and Necessity" (dated but excellent), Nick Lane's whole series of books (notably "The Vital Question"), Nurse's "What is Life?" (good if you want to learn about yeast), Zimmer's "Life's Edge" (haven't finished it yet, seems good). Honestly, the details change, and the emphasis of each author, but they are all speculative and hand-wavey. Pre-paradigmatic. My favorite quote is from "Life on the Edge" by McFadden and Al-Khalili:
"Biologists cannot even agree on a unique definition of life itself; but that hasn’t stopped them from unraveling aspects of the cell, the double helix, photosynthesis, enzymes and a host of other living phenomena"
