BIOLF

Biologists and philosophers have long pondered the differences between inert matter and living entities. Rather than concentrating on this type of comparison, we will mention some compelling characteristics of the living that should be taken into consideration when addressing biological phenomena. They are: agency (the capacity to initiate action), normativity (the capacity of generating their own rules), individuation (the ability to change one’s own organization), the propensity to become sick, and the return to health. In this regard, Bichat referring to physical deformities stated: “Whereas monsters are still living beings, there is no distinction between normal and pathological in physics and mechanics”. The distinction between the normal and the pathological holds for living beings alone



Biology has one comprehensive theory, the theory of evolution which encompasses the time-scale of phylogenesis and is based on two principles, i) reproduction with modification, and ii) natural selection. In contrast, a theory of organisms encompassing the time-scale of a life cycle has yet to be formulated. The theoretical wealth of biology is manifested by the various theories that address important but more restricted areas of biology, such as the cell theory, the chromosome theory, the germ theory of disease, etc. Among those, the one relevant to this chapter is cell theory, which postulates that cells i) are the basic unit of life, ii) are made from pre-existing cells, and iii) that organisms are made up of one or more cells and extracellular matrices, which are made by cells.

The biological default state

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we could observe the moment that life emerged from the pre-biotic soup…. What would have been the properties of this first cell? Is it reasonable to infer that it would do pretty much the same as unicellular organisms do today? Indeed, microbiologists agree that unicellular organisms spontaneously proliferate as long as their milieu provides sufficient nutrients and appropriate ranges of pH, temperature and pressure. They would also agree that motility is commonplace in unicellular prokaryotes and eukaryotes; by motility we mean the ability to initiate movement. Motility is perhaps the most obvious instantiation of agency, i.e., the characteristic that makes the intuitive distinction between alive and inert.

Variation, an integral part of the biological default state, is readily generated with each cell division.