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  • Chapter 11 - The origin of life and the definition of life

  • Edited by Tuomas E. Tahko, University of Helsinki
  • Book:
    Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics
    Published online:
    05 December 2011
    Print publication:
    08 December 2011, pp 174-186

  • Summary

    Paul Davies's principal thesis is that although nothing rules out the possibility of life having originated on some other planet, the oldest forms of life on Earth consist of bacteria and other micro-organisms which eat unappetizing substances like sulphur and hydrogen sulphide and live in scalding volcanic jets four kilometres down at the bottom of the sea. Davies's overall thesis is that the division between living and non-living beings coincides with the introduction of informational software in the form of the genetic code. The hardware is the DNA and RNA molecules; the software is the encoded message they convey to the protein-making factories, which assemble proteins out of amino acid components. A difference between DNA-based information, and the analog information suggested in this chapter to be underlying development, is that the former, based on nucleotide sequences, is one-dimensional, whereas the latter can be three-dimensional or four-dimensional.