This is part of a series: Define Life
Over the past week, I asked a few people my question:
“If an inventor says that he’s created a new kind of life, how can you know if he’s right?”
The results were rather interesting. Even with a small sample size, I had quite diverse answers. When I think of life, I usually think of it in the same way that I think of cars, computers, houses, etc. I think of it as a type of machine or system. Thus, when I ask about an inventor making a new kind, I ask it expecting the same kind of response that I’d expect if I asked how one could recognize a completely new kind of computer. I expect some attempt to define what processes, characteristics or functions separate life from non-life. I expect to hear only about the properties of the creatures themselves.
One person looked at it in this way, but most of the people who had an opinion thought of life in a fundamentally different way. For them, life is defined not only by the machinery of biology, nor is it only defined by the things that only living things can do. They also believe that life only counts as life when it has the correct origin.
Erik Popp 