What is Life? Among Other Things, It's a Synergistic Effect!(Essay‪)‬

Of all the wonders of the universe, life is surely the most wonderful. And complex. For living organisms have many unique attributes. Perhaps this is what accounts for our persistent difficulty in being able to define it in any succinct and quintessential way. Over the years, life has been variously characterized as a "happening", a thermodynamic process, a repository (and a user) of information, a mind-boggling array of chemical processes, a complex division of labor, a robot vehicle designed to further the interests of "selfish genes," and many others. Life has also been clothed with various portentous buzzwords--autopoeisis, emergence, self-organization, sentience, autonomy, and more. And, of course, generations of philosophers and humanists, from Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece to the 20th century paleontologist/priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin--and many others before and since--have pondered the remarkable phenomenon of life in an effort to illuminate its essence.