Concept in Definition ABC

Since always and due to the pronounced abstract condition of the concept, there have been difficulties in defining what is lifetime. At one point, it was even decided to first define what was not life in order to get closer to a more certain and concrete definition of what was life.

Life can be understood through various formulations, that is, it is one of those concepts that are not necessarily defined with a single and universal definition. For example, there are some who argue that Life is an essential internal condition that categorizes living beings, for others, that it is an intermediate state between birth and death. Meanwhile, biology, the science that has most concerned and deals with living beings, defines life as alive. molecular structure capable of establishing a material support for homeostatic energy transfer when it is stimulated by the environment under favorable conditions (constant and stable).

And if not, to continue advancing in the understanding of this very abstract concept, we can very validly choose from what many have done to understand what life is, define what is NOT life: any structure, even if contain

DNA, unable to achieve that Balance that we mentioned before. Consequently, the importance of understanding the phenomenon of life in an environment is highlighted, that is, within the framework of the interaction of the organism that we call living with the environment that surrounds it. These processes also involve contact and interaction, in turn, with other organisms living.

And finally another valid and enlightening resource in the absence of an absolute definition, turns out to be to list those things that characterize living beings as being: the organization mobile, the reproduction, growth, evolution, homeostasis and movement. In this sense, it should be emphasized that viruses, lacking cellular structure, are "organisms" whose classification as living beings is the subject of incessant debates in the environment scientific. On the other hand, there is no doubt inclusion in the versatile catalog of the living organisms of plants, fungi, animals, prostistas, moneras and bacteria, including the so-called archaea.

Biology, as we pointed out above, is the science that deals with the study of life and, meanwhile, those who dedicated themselves to the study of the same, known as biologists, is to whom we owe, thanks to their effort and study, most of the knowledge about is.

Biologists came to the conclusion that life is grouped into various organized structural levels. For example, the union between cells gives rise to a tissue and the communion of these gives reason for being to an organ such as the heart or stomach that fulfill specific functions and thus the different levels will continue to be grouped until giving rise to a population and more broadly to a community by example. Is stratification of living organisms has given rise to different interpretations that also motivated a profound rethinking of the life concept. Thus, for this way of cataloging living beings into levels of organization, an isolated cell could be considered of a higher animal or plant as a living organism, as it can survive under the favorable conditions in a medium suitable. At the opposite end of the scale, a colony of social insects could itself be defined as a complete living organism, in which each individual behaves in a way analogous to that of the cells of a animal.

On the other hand, all known forms of life on the planet have carbon as a fundamental constituent element, given the property of this substance to have 4 paired electrons and, in this way, form molecules with large chains (macromolecules). The second fundamental component is water, made up of oxygen and hydrogen. If nitrogen from the protein and the sulfur and phosphorus of DNA, it can be shown that, for elemental life, only 6 basic elements are needed. Faced with the new debate motivated by robotics around "artificial life", it is pointed out that electronic devices with the ability to Data processing, like computers, is based on a different line of elements, of which the preponderant is the silicon. It is striking that silicon can also form large molecular chains, comparable to carbon. Therefore, perhaps the substrate of a future artificial life proceeds from this different sequence of atoms, with unsuspected future and results.

Topics in Life