Four Puzzles About Life
نویسنده
چکیده
To surmount the notorious difficulties of defining life, we should evaluate theories of life not by whether they provide necessary and sufficient conditions for our current preconceptions about life but by how well they explain living phenomena and how satisfactorily they resolve puzzles about life. On these grounds, the theory of life as supple adaptation gets support from the natural and compelling way it resolves the following four puzzles: (a) How are different forms of life at different levels of the vital hierarchy related? (b) Is there a continuum between life and nonlife? (c) Does life essentially concern a living entity's material composition or its form? (d) Are life and mind intrinsically connected?
منابع مشابه
Lingering Puzzles about Myxobacteria
T he myxobacteria are social and capable of constructing intricate macroscopic structures called fruiting bodies. First recognized as bacteria in 1892 by the cryptogamic botanist Roland Thaxter, these exotic anomalies have proved challenging to microbiologists. Even so, we now know a great deal about the nutrition, life cycle, growth physiology, intermediary metabolism, structural chemistry, ge...
متن کاملDevelopmental parallels in understanding minds and bodies.
A recent article by Onishi and Baillargeon presents evidence that 15-month-old infants attribute false beliefs (FBs) to other people. If correct, it lends dramatic new support to the idea that mental state concepts ("theory of mind") emerge from a specialized neurocognitive mechanism that matures during the second year of life. But it also raises new puzzles concerning the FB task--puzzles that...
متن کاملThe impact of using problem-solving puzzles on Iranian intermediate EFL learners' lexical knowledge
This study tried to investigate the impact of using problem-solving puzzles onIranian Intermediate EFL learners' lexical knowledge. At first a homogenoussample of 30 Intermediate EFL learners attending in the third grade of Shahedhigh school in Lahijan were selected and they were randomly divided into twogroups, as experimental group and control group. In the first session, the pretestwas admin...
متن کاملVintage Plastic Sliding-letter Puzzles
One artifact from my childhood in the 1960’s that I still remember vividly is the series of plastic slidingblock puzzles manufactured by The Roalex Company of Forest Hills, NY (no relation to the maker of fine timepieces). These consisted of a high-quality plastic puzzle glued to a piece of cardboard containing information about the puzzle. Most of their sixty or so different designs were based...
متن کاملA Tale of Two Puzzles: Towers of Hanoi and Spin-Out
Once upon a time, there were two puzzles. One was the Towers of Hanoi invented or introduced by Eduardo Lucas in 1883. The other was Spin-Out patented by William Keister in 1972. There are many stories about these puzzles. Some of these stories hint or claim that these puzzles have an intimate relationship with the Gray codes invented by Frank Gray in 1947. Here, we wish to show how these puzzl...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Artificial life
دوره 4 2 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 1998