Life/External Links

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• "In the Beginning..." (The Economist)
  • From the preface: "How life on Earth got going is still mysterious, but not for want of ideas."

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
  • Excerpt from Conclusion: "Living organisms are autopoietic systems: self-constructing, self-maintaining, energy-transducing autocatalytic entities” in which information needed to construct the next generation of organisms is stabilized in nucleic acids that replicate within the context of whole cells and work with other developmental resources during the life-cycles of organisms, but they are also “systems capable of evolving by variation and natural selection: self-reproducing entities, whose forms and functions are adapted to their environment and reflect the composition and history of an ecosystem” (Harold, F.M., 2001. The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms and the Order of Life, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 232)."

• Life under extreme conditions.

• Life - Encyclopedia Britannica article by Carl Sagan, etc.

• LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!
  • An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm (Aug. 27, 2007), with videos and full-text transcript. Summary

• How to treat fundamental questions.

• What is Life. The Franklin Institute

• Tree of Life — A taxonomy of biological species

• The last post - a blog entry on what it means to die, composed by Derek K. Miller and posted on his behalf the day after he died of colorectal cancer

• What life is. Site published and maintained by Lukas K. Buehler, PhD, assistant professor in biology at Southwestern College, Chula Vista, California.
  • Pages: Life can be studied as a hierarchical structure | Biologists use scientific principles to study living things | The chemistry of life | Cell structures | No life without energy | No life without enzymes | Life operates in small steps | All cells come from cells (the life cycle) | Asexual reproduction and mitosis | Sexual reproduction and meiosis | Genetic variability is the result of random mutations | Mendelian genetics and patterns of inheritance | Molecular biology of the gene | Evolution - the unifying principle in biology | Evidence of Evolution | Mechanisms of Evolution