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causal analysis of living systems, form molecular networks to ecosystems

1995 …2024

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research Focus

To answer the question "what is life?" we need a scientifically rigorous definition of life that is sufficiently general to encompass all possible life and yet precise enough to exclude all that is not. The serious pursuit of this aim entails the construction of a deep and innovative model of life that opens new areas of research that may become the foundation of previously unimagined technologies. The position currently is that life is an information process - computation - that runs on biochemistry. As a computation (an algorithm) what it computes is itself. In this sense it is a physical realisation of Von Neumann’s self replicator. The physical constraints on this natural process result in its characteristic features such as entropy pumping (far from equilibrium heat dissipation) and the need for a physical boundary (membrane or tegument), metabolism and stable information storage, together with the property first analysed by Robert Rosen - that of closure to efficient causation. The result is that life almost certainly must be cellular. Here on earth, the very first living cell has self-replicated and, because the result is sometimes imperfect, the copies have diversified to produce the current sum total and diversity of all life on earth: every bacterium and every cell in our bodies are descendants of the last common ancestor. Evolution by natural selection is a natural consequence of this community of imperfectly self-replicating cells competing for restricted resources, as they must. The closure to efficient causation is incomplete - it strictly applies only to life as a whole, not to each cell, because every cell depends on inherited constitutional information. But beyond that, the closure (cycle) of ontological causes (A creates B creates C creates A) forms the basis of life’s most physically profound and innovative property - its autonomy which gives freedom from physical chains of cause and effect. Autonomy enables living systems to choose and manipulate their environments, introducing goals and purpose for the first time in the development of the universe. As human life forms (and their created society) have reached the point of being able to manufacture artificial life, artificial intelligence and perhaps discover life beyond the earth, we need to properly understand these fundamental principles, or else we may stumble into existential disaster… just a thought!

Research Interests

More up to date and accurate information is available from my staff profile : 

http://www.whatlifeis.info/pages/KDF_Webpages/Keith_frontpage.html

The website http://www.whatlifeis.info provides a thorough and interesting introduction to the work I am conducting on the fundamental question of what life is, how it got to be the way it is and ultimately what this means for us. 

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
  • SDG 13 - Climate Action
  • SDG 14 - Life Below Water
  • SDG 15 - Life on Land

Keywords

  • Q Science (General)
  • Theoretical Biology
  • Causation
  • autonomy
  • complex systems
  • origin of life
  • information theory

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