this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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[โ€“] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I disagree. At one time, consensus was the Earth was the center of the universe, that the world was just a few thousand years old, that life just sprung into being sometimes, that unwashed hands were perfectly fine to perform surgery with, that some peoples were much closer to other animals than some other peoples, that the universe was static, that light was continuous, and that Ceres was a planet.

Consensus is nice, but usefulness is the gold standard. Is holding metabolism and a complex proteome as the limit of life --excluding viruses, preons, and mechanical reproducers-- useful to expanding our understanding of life and how it functions? Is taking replicators as the most important distinction a necessary step to understanding the origin of life and how we can engineer it ourselves? Will the ability to manipulate certain chemicals and not others help us describe the world? Are edge cases explained better with a genomic, proteomic, or metabolomic base?

I do know that we have a lot left to learn, and I would be very surprised if our current definition of life is fully sufficient for the next century of life sciences.