What is life?

“A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian

evolution.” – NASA definition of life

Life on Earth
We are intimately familiar with life around us because we’ve seen and interacted
with them all our lives. But some forms of life went unrecognized for most of
human history because they were impossible to see until microscopes were
invented. Other living organisms may be difficult to recognize, even when seen,
as in this picture below.

So how do we distinguish life or non-life? What are the attributes that all living
organisms on Earth share? Which of these attributes are absent in non-living
organisms, and exclusive to living organisms?

In addition to life on Earth, what about the possibility of life on other planets,
with environments utterly unlike our planet? Suppose that we launch an
exploratory mission to Mars or Europa (NASA mission to Europa, a moon of

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Jupiter with evidence for briny seas and hydrothermal vents beneath a layer of
ice) and can send a laboratory module equipped with any type of analytical
instrumentation you can think of. How would you search for evidence of life on
Mars or Europa? If we look at the fundamental properties of life, what might be
some emergent properties of life? There are five generally agreed upon criteria
for life:
1. Need for energy
2. Organization in membrane-bound cells
3. Genetic information
4. Ability to replicate
5. Change over time – growth and response to stimuli
Evolution as an emergent property of life
A key part of any definition of life is that living organisms reproduce. Let’s now
add a couple of observations:

▪ The process of reproduction, while mostly accurate, is imperfect.

When cells divide, they have to replicate their DNA. Although DNA
replication is highly accurate, it still makes about 1 mistake in 10
million nucleotides. Over generations, the population will contain lots
of heritable variation.
▪ The population of a given type of organism will tend to grow
exponentially, but will reach a limit, where the individuals have to
compete with each other for the limiting resource (food, space, mates,
sunlight, etc.)
Suppose some heritable variations (speed, strength, sharper claws, bigger teeth)
make some individuals more competitive for the limiting resource – what will
happen?
The individuals with superior variants will acquire more resources and have
more progeny. If the superior variants are heritable, then their progeny will
have the same superior variants. Over generations, then, a larger and larger
proportion of the population will consist of individuals with the superior
heritable variants. This is a form of biological evolution, via natural selection.

Definition: Biological evolution is change in the heritable

characteristics of a population. In more technical terms, evolution is
defined as change in the gene pool of a population, measurable as changes in
genetic variant (allele) frequencies in a population.
Suppose there is heritable variation in a population, and the heritable variation
makes a difference in the survival and reproduction of individual organisms. If
these conditions exist, and they do for all natural populations of living
organisms, evolution must occur. Life evolves!
Charles Darwin called this process natural selection. He and Alfred Wallace
were the first to propose that evolution by natural selection could explain the
origin of all the multitudes of species on Earth and how they appear so well-
adapted in form and function to their particular environments. Moreover,
Darwin proposed that all of life on Earth descended from a common ancestor,
via slow, incremental accumulation of heritable (genetic) changes.
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Because the definition of evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of a
population, evolution can occur by means other than natural selection.
Evolution can also occur via random processes, especially in small populations,
where the frequency of some heritable traits may rise or fall just by chance.

Three domains of life

The genetic material DNA is common to all organisms in the tree of life. DNA
sequence comparisons and structural and biochemical comparisons consistently
categorize all living organisms into three primary domains: Bacteria, Archaea,
and Eukaryota. Both Bacteria and Archaea are prokaryotes, single-celled
microorganisms with no nuclei, and Eukaryota includes us and all other
animals, plants, fungi, and single-celled protists—all organisms whose cells have
nuclei to enclose their DNA apart from the rest of the cell. The fossil record
indicates that the first living organisms were prokaryotes (Bacteria and
Archaea), and eukaryotes arose a billion years later.

People (yes, that includes all of us) are made up of cells from all three domains
of life. Our bodies have about 37 trillion (3.7 x 10^13) human cells (hosts of the
DNA inherited from our parents), and about 100 trillion (1 x 10^14) bacteria,
mostly in the gut (American Society for Microbiology, Human Microbiome
FAQ). We also have archaea, primarily methanogens (responsible for
flatulence!), though they appear to comprise less than 1% of our intestinal
microflora (Lurie-Weinberger MN, Gophna U, 2015).

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What about Viruses?
Given their impact on living things, you are probably wondering where viruses
fit into this organizational system. Are they alive? Viruses are not composed of
cells and cannot reproduce on their own, but rather have to ‘take over’ a cell to
replicate. Most biologists do not lose much sleep over the debate of whether
viruses are classified as living. We think instead about how viruses operate in
the world. Viruses act as obligate cellular parasites. That means that they can
survive, reproduce, and create new variants when they live inside of and harm
another organism.

How long can viruses survive outside a host? In a review of infections

originating in hospitals, Kramer et al (2006) found that respiratory viruses,
including influenza, corona, and rhino viruses, persisted on surfaces for up to
several days. Gastrointestinal viruses often persist in humans for a couple of
months, while blood-borne viruses like HIV can persist for more than one week
outside a host. We can, then, say that viruses use either DNA or RNA for their
hereditary material. They also require a host cell to carry out their metabolic
activities.

Adapted from What is life? | Biological Principles (gatech.edu)

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