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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that NASA's definition of life as 'a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution' is implausible.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 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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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 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 against 2 of 2
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    • 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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