What is life?

a short essay

In 1944, Schrödinger published What is Life? in which he summarized what was currently known about the biological phenomenon know as life, he applied his scientific reasoning to deduce what the other properties of life could be given the known characteristics, and he put forth what we could expect to learn about life in the future.

He postulated that the information that is passed down from parent to offspring that informs the organization of molecules and cells that constitute a living organism may be stored in an aperiodic crystal—in that he meant a solid that had a non-repetitive ordering and was resistant to change. He reasoned that since heritable information must be stable from generation to generation with only a few mutations introduced in each generation (which was understood through Darwin’s work) that an aperiodic crystal (or aperiodic solid) could be a plausible way that this could be achieved.

Now, we know that the heritable material that holds the information of life is stored in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and the information not only is stored in the order of the sequence (which fits with what Schrödinger hypothesized) but also in the way that the molecule is folded and the locations of other molecules that decorate its surface (the epigenetics).

Today, most grade school children who have access to either mainstream media or to a decent education know more about the mystery about how life is propagated than Schrödinger. The progress that has been made in the past 80 years in research has been truly astonishing. Now, we know the answer to “What is life?” and we have turned our attention to the question “What is mind?”

In that same book, Schrödinger himself expressed skepticism that we could get a satisfying answer to that second question, but these days we know more about the brain, its different parts, and how they function. We have more clues. Perhaps, we have enough to begin to solve it.

To be continued…