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    NASA's definition of life as 'a self-sustaining chemical ... — Carmelics
    Home/Afterlife & Death
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    NASA's definition of life as 'a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution' is implausible.

    Afterlife & Death
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Darwinian evolution requires heritable variation across generations, a property of lineages, not individual organisms.
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    • 2.Defining life by a population-level process category-mistakes the explanandum: we want to know what makes a single entity alive.
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    • 3.Aristotle's hylomorphic account and contemporary neo-Aristotelian views (e.g., Marjorie Grene, David Hull) locate life in individual organizational form, not evolutionary history.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.A sterile mule or a post-reproductive organism cannot contribute to Darwinian evolution yet remains paradigmatically alive, constituting a direct counterexample to NASA's definition.
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    • 2.Christopher Chyba and Carl Sagan's own work acknowledges that operational definitions of life must apply to individuals, revealing an internal tension in the NASA framework.
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    • 3.Any adequate definition of life must be extensionally correct—applying to all and only living things—and NASA's definition fails this criterion by excluding non-reproducing individuals.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.The ability to evolve by natural selection is a feature that collections of organisms (species) may have, but it is not a feature an individual organism may have.
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    • 2.Individual organisms, such as a particular dog, cannot undergo the process of Darwinian evolution.
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    • 3.Yet individual organisms may be alive.
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    Topics

    Afterlife & Death

    Related

    A sterile mule or a post-reproductive organism cannot contribute to Darwinian ev...Any adequate definition of life must be extensionally correct—applying to all an...Aristotle's hylomorphic account and contemporary neo-Aristotelian views (e.g., M...Christopher Chyba and Carl Sagan's own work acknowledges that operational defini...
    +5 moreShow less
    Darwinian evolution requires heritable variation across generations, a property ...Defining life by a population-level process category-mistakes the explanandum: w...Individual organisms, such as a particular dog, cannot undergo the process of Da...The ability to evolve by natural selection is a feature that collections of orga...Yet individual organisms may be alive.

    Similar

    Being alive is a property an individual may bear on its own, without b...73%Objective meaning in life does not require immortality73%If theism is true, human life is the product of an evolutionary proces...73%Williams's claim that immortality cannot be made desirable is not esta...72%

    Source

    AI-extracted2/3 agreementValid
    SEP: death
    View source passageHide passage
    What, now, about accounts that analyze life in terms of genetic information? Feldman thinks that something like the Jonah problem arises for any account according which being alive consists in containing DNA or other genetic information, as dead organisms contain DNA. A further problem for such views is that it is conceivable there are or could be life forms (say on other planets) that are not based on genetic information. This latter difficulty can be avoided if we say that being alive consists in having the ability to evolve, to engage in Darwinian evolution, assuming that evolution by natur...
    Extraction notes

    Validity: The premises are explicitly stated in the passage and together they rationally attack (i.e., argue against) NASA's definition by showing it fails to account for individual living organisms, which cannot themselves undergo Darwinian evolution.

    Confidence: High confidence; the argument is explicitly laid out in the text.

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit