"The Definition Of Life (Or Is It?)" Question: What Does It Mean To Say Something Is Alive, Conscious, And/Or Intelligent? Requirements: 1000 2000 Words

1529 words - 6 pages

To say something is alive, conscious, and or intelligent has a unique meaning for each person. We can try and define these aspects, but we have no proof; all we have are supporting facts. The correct definition of life still cannot be agreed upon by scientists; there are simply too many exceptions. Scientists have, however, come up with nine main characteristics of life, although this still does not have unanimous support. Arguments include the characteristic of reproducing being part of the nine, for animals such as mules are thought to be alive and yet cant produce offspring. Nonetheless, the other characteristics of living things, including growth, adaptation, responsiveness, organization, the usage of energy, being made of cells, having a definite form and limited size, and death seem to be necessary conditions for life.One major argument in this field is whether prions are alive. As Sean Henahan said in his article New Findings on Prions, Rogue prions, which are misfolded forms of the normal prions, are unusual in that they can convert normal prions into copies of themselves. They do not metabolize, they simply collide with correctly folded proteins. Because prions are not actually alive, and dont have any genetic information, they cant be killed by any of the common ways such as heating, sterilizing, and more. Prions are not made of cells, cant reproduce on their own, do not grow or undergo division, and do not transform energy. Many people believe that they are not alive, that theyre just one of our own proteins that has gone wrong and that has the capability to cause normal PrP to go wrong, too.Similarly, viruses are a controversial issue. They are somewhere between complicated complexes and extremely simple biological entities. Viruses have some of the structures and show some of the doings that are generally customary to organic life, but they dont have many of the others, including the parts that are necessary for reproduction. If a virus wants to reproduce, it first has to infect a host cell. According to Stephan Callaghan, in his article Viruses, Viruses are obligate intracellular parasites, meaning that they can only reproduce by invading and taking over other cells as they lack the cellular machinery for self reproduction. They are generally said to be non-living by virologists because they dont have all the characteristics of the conventional definition of life. Such characteristics include the facts that viruses do not move, metabolize, or decay on their own; and they do not feed or generate energy or waste products. Viruses are, no pun intended, lifeless until they attach to a live body cell. This leads to the conclusion that viruses are, indeed, nonliving.Yet another debate is whether a proto-cell created in a laboratory would be considered alive or not. On the word of Carl Zimmer in What Came Before DNA, In a world before DNA, RNA...

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