ArticleOrigins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life2019
Towards a General Definition of Life.
Article in Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Life - A glimpse into the phenomenon.Bioinformation · 2026Article
- Are we trapped on Earth: space and accelerated ageing.NPJ microgravity · 2025Review
- What Is life? Rethinking Biology in Light of Fundamental Parameters.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- The Conformational Contribution to Molecular Complexity and Its Implications for Information Processing in Living Beings and Chemical Artificial Intelligence.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Reflections upon a new definition of life.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2023Article
- Viruses in astrobiology.Frontiers in microbiology · 2022Review
- What is life?Molecular biology reports · 2021Article
- Molecules, Information and the Origin of Life: What Is Next?Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Selenium nanovirus and its cytotoxicity in selenite-exposed higher living organisms.Biochemistry and biophysics reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A new definition of life is proposed and discussed in the present article. It is formulated by modifying and extending NASA's working definition of life, which postulates that life is a "self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution". The new definition includes a thermodynamical aspect of life as a far from equilibrium system and considers the flow of information from the environment to the living system. In our derivation of the definition of life we have assumed the hypothesis, that during the emergence of life evolution had to first involve autocatalytic systems that only subsequently acquired the capacity of genetic heredity. The new proposed definition of life is independent of the mode of evolution, regardless of whether Lamarckian or Darwinian evolution operated at the origins of life and throughout evolutionary history. The new definition of life presented herein is formulated in a minimal manner and it is general enough that it does not distinguish between individual (metabolic) network and the collective (ecological) one. The newly proposed definition of life may be of interest for astrobiology, research into the origins of life or for efforts to produce synthetic or artificial life, and it furthermore may also have implications in the cognitive and computer sciences.
Indexed as
Identifiers
31222432What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.