‘Life Series – Final Post’ is the ninth and final part of our ‘Life’ Series
This ‘Life Series – Final Post’ is our last post of our series on “Life” and of our discussions of the ideas in Addy Pross‘s recent book, “What is Life?”. To avoid spoilers we have decided to leave the last word on this topic, “What is Life?”, to Addy Pross. You will find his conclusions on this question in chapter eight of his book.
Life Series – Final Post, and our Shift in Focus
In the course of reviewing Pross’s book in this present ‘Life’ series we became interested in an important characteristic of life that Pross did not appear to cover. This characteristic is the cooperative nature of life. It is a characteristic which seems to have evolved out of the beginnings of life and perhaps is not fundamental in the evolutionary creation of biology out of chemistry. Nevertheless the cooperative nature of life seems to be a fundamental aspect of life once life came into existence.
New Series – ‘Life is Cooperative’
As anyone who has ever been involved in complex systems of any type knows, cooperation is a critical component in the creation, operation, and maintenance of complex systems. The biological complex systems that make up living things are no exception. So we will shortly begin a new series of posts entitled “Life is Cooperative” in which we shall examine and discuss cooperation, the essential component of living things, that permits life on earth to exist, and why it may be more important than competition in terms of evolution.
Summary of ‘Life’ Series
This present series of posts, “Life’, considered several characteristics of life that Addy Pross highlighted in his recent book, “What is life?”. These important characteristics are:
Life’s complexity,
Life’s instability,
Life’s dynamic nature,
Life’s diversity,
Life’s chirality
Life’s teleonomic character,
There are additional important questions posed in Pross’s book which we have not discussed in this series. These are:
Consciousness,
How would alien life look?,
Synthesizing life,
How did life emerge?,
Life as a network.
The goal of Pross’s book was to demonstrate that answers to several of life’s questions are finally becoming accessible.
If you wish to explore these matters further we suggest that you read Pross’s book as this, our present series, has only lightly touched on some of these questions. A much deeper discussion and explanation is presented by Pross in his book.
In the course of reviewing this question of ‘What is Life?’ we found important references to other people’s input to this question. We have referenced some of these sources in the various posts. It is an area of interest to many researchers.
(post dated 22/10/2025).