fiction and non-fiction books
‘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…
‘Do Living things have an Agenda?’ is Part Eight of our ‘Life’ Series In this post, ‘Do living things have an agenda?’, we continue our series on “Life” and our discussion of the ideas in Addy Pross‘s recent book, “What is Life?”. Pross describes the teleonomic character of life as its most amazing property. But…
‘Life has Chiralty’ is Part Seven of our ‘Life’ Series In this post, Life has Chiralty, we continue our series on “Life” and our discussion of the ideas in Addy Pross‘s recent book, “What is Life?”. Life has chirality, or ‘handedness’. That is to say that many of the molecules found in living systems (biomolecules)…
‘Is Life in Equilibrium?’ is Part Six of our ‘Life’ Series In this post, Is Life in Equilibrium?, we continue our series on “Life” and our discussion of the ideas in Andy Pross‘s recent book, “What is Life?”. Pross introduced us to the idea that life’s organized complexity represents a thermodynamic puzzle. But related to…
‘Life is Diverse’ is Part Five of our ‘Life’ Series In this post, Life is Diverse, we continue our series on “Life” and our discussion of the ideas in Addy Pross‘s recent book, “What is Life?”. While non-living diversity in the Universe is arbitrary, living diversity appears to be deliberate and coherent. But the macroscopic…
‘Life is Dynamic’, is Part Four of our ‘Life’ Series In this post, Life is Dynamic, we continue our series on “Life” and our discussion of the ideas in Addy Pross‘s recent book, “What is Life?”. The non-living part of the Universe, the vast majority of the Universe, is static, unlike Life which is dynamic….
‘Purpose of Life’ is Part three of our ‘Life’ Series. In this post, we discuss the Purpose of Life, or at least the ‘purposeful character‘ of Life. We recall that in our previous two posts in this “Life” series, we discussed Addy Pross’ new book, “What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology“, and how Life…
‘Life is Strange’ is Part two of our ‘Life’ Blog Series. In my last post, ‘What is Life?’, the first post in this series on ‘Life‘, I referenced a very interesting book by Addy Pross: “What is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology”. The first chapter of Pross’s book is entitled “Living Things are so Very…
Deep Time is a recent concept. As explained in this Wikipedia entry, it was coined by John McPhee in 1981 to apply to geologic time. The geologic time scale was introduced by James Hutton in the 18th century to refer to the rock record of Earth. Since then modern geologists have extended the scale back…
I was inspired to start this new series of blog posts by the question, What is life? So this is the first of a non-fiction science series featuring the subject of Life. For definitions of this topic, see here. If you Google “What is life?” you will get a very long list of references to…