LIFE
The greater mankind's knowledge becomes, the harder it is to define the idea of life. This difficulty is curious since almost all human beings fell that they know, without any ambiguity, the difference between something alive and something dead. However, our advancing knowledge tells us that the passage from life to death involves the successive stopping of an enormous number of biological processes. We now find it more and more difficult, scientifically and legally, to define the time when life ceases. The same maybe said for the time when life begins.
This difficulty is reflected in the scientific viewpoint that there is no sharp boundary between the living and the nonliving. There appears to be a gradual transition, a continuum, from the animate to the inanimate. In the middle of this continuum are the viruses. Outside a living cell, viruses appear to be only rather complicated molecules, with nothing more "living" about them than many other complex molecules that the chemist synthesizes. Inside a living cell, the viruses take on most of the properties that characterize life.
The more we learn about biology, the less appears the need to call on any mysterious "vital force" to explain either the origins or the processes of life. Most scientists regard life as an intrinsic property of certain kinds of matter. They believe that as a result of fairly well-understood atomic and molecular properties, matter tends to self-aggregate into more and more complex forms and that life is the inevitable result of this self-aggregation.
According to the Grolier Dictionary, life is the property or quality manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, response to stimulation, and reproduction, by which living organisms are distinguished from dead organisms or from inanimate matter. It is the characteristic state or condition of a living organism.
The present discussion is based entirely on scient...