Definitions of Life and Rhetoric

As part of our new core curriculum, the college is trying to infuse ‘integration’ into a student’s first-year courses. The first-year living learning communities (LLCs) have been co-opted as a vehicle to emphasize the liberal arts and introduce the notion of how different academic disciplines can ‘integrate’ in a holistic manner. The underlying idea is that knowledge is inter-connected and different knowledge areas enhance each other in conversation, dialogue and collaboration. If all this sounds buzzword-y, yes, it is also accompanied by lots of promotion that hopes to make it buzz-worthy.

How this takes shape in the fall semester is through ‘open classrooms’. The faculty members teaching in each LLC put together a session aimed at showing how disciplines integrate with other disciplines within some broader theme. These broad themes are vague sounding evocations that can easily encompass any specific discipline. Examples include words such as ‘cultivate’ or ‘innovate’. My LLC is ‘illuminate’ and I’ve themed my first semester general chemistry course “Hidden in plain sight: Elucidating the Secret Structure of Matter”. A chunk of the course material involves the interaction of light and matter, so I can easily fit the theme within my standard operating procedures for teaching the class. For example, yesterday we discussed how x-rays are used to elucidate the structure of crystalline solids.

My LLC decided that our open classrooms would involve two faculty members bringing their disciplinary expertise together – we’re showing an example of integration! By luck or design we have an equal number of faculties from the humanities and the STEM fields; I was paired with a colleague trained in Rhetoric who thinks deeply about how words communicate, define, argue, persuade, etc. She has projects in collaboration with scientists related to how certain concepts are used and communicated. I was going to incorporate my research interests in the chemical origins of life. We planned an hour-long session that engaged 40-50 students this past week. Here’s what we did.

I started off the session by having students look through a list of definitions for Life. To keep this tractable, we just considered 20 definitions. As a starting point, I had students work individually to indicate which of the definitions they thought came from a Biologist, Chemist, Physicist, Non-Scientist, or Other (with their own category). I also asked them to guess which one definition was pulled from a dictionary and which one came from a NASA panel. (I talked about the implications of having an agreed upon NASA definition when designing missions to Mars and beyond.)

In case you wanted to enjoy the experience, here they are.

1. Life is a power, force or property of a special and peculiar kind, temporarily influencing matter and its ordinary force, but entirely different from, and in no way correlated with, any of these.

2. It is the particular manner of composition of the materials and processes, their spatial and temporal organization which constitute what we call life.

3. Life seems to be orderly and lawful behavior of matter, not based exclusively on its tendency to go over from order to disorder, but based partly on existing order that is kept up.

4. Life is an open system that is self-replicating, self-regulating, and feeds on energy from the environment.

5. Any system capable of replication and mutation is alive.

6. Life is a potentially self-perpetuating system of linked organic reactions, catalyzed stepwise and almost isothermally by complex and specific organic catalysts which are themselves produced by the system.

7. Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity.

8. We regard as alive any population of entities which has the properties of multiplication, heredity and variation.

9. Life is the property of plants and animals which makes it possible for them to take in food, get energy from it, grow, adapt themselves to their surrounding and reproduce their kind. It is the quality that distinguishes an animal or plant from inorganic matter.

10. The most conspicuous attribute of biological organization is its complexity. The physical problem of the origin of life can be reduced to the question: “Is there a mechanism of which complexity can be generated in a regular, reproducible way?”

11. Life is an expected, collectively self-organized property of catalytic polymers.

12. Life is the ability to communicate.

13. Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.

14. Life is defined as a material system that can acquire, store, process, and use information to organize its activities.

15. Life is a system capable of (1) self-organization, (2) self-replication, (3) evolution through mutation, (4) metabolism, and (5) concentrative encapsulation.

16. Life is what the scientific establishment, probably after some healthy disagreement, will accept as life.

17. Life is a set of symbiotically-linked molecular engines, permanently operating out of equilibrium, in an open flow of energy and matter, although recycling a great deal of their own chemical components.

18. Life is a system which has subjectivity.

19. Life is the symphony of dynamic and highly integrated algorithmic processes which yields homeostatic metabolism, development, growth, and reproduction.

20. It’s alive if it can die.

I then had the students think-pair-share for a few minutes and then called on different pairs to tell me what they discussed and why. I had instructed them to pick out definitions they found interesting where they differed from their neighbor in their individual answers. Students got to think and discuss how they would distinguish biology, chemistry and physics, from each other, and perhaps from something outside those categories. I gave a few ‘answers’ along the way as part of the discussion, but not all, so as to keep everyone engaged. I then told the students a brief story about how one might think about the overlap between disciplines. Here’s the slide I showed.

I talked about how I’m a physical chemist, sitting at the boundary between chemistry and physics, and how someone else might define himself or herself as a chemical physicist. The two communities have their own journals – the Journal of Physical Chemistry published by the American Chemical Society, and the Journal of Chemical Physics published by the American Physical Society. I talked about biochemistry and chemical biology. There’s biophysics, but no physical biology as a field (as far as I’m aware). One of the 20 definitions was by Nobel-prize winner Manfred Eigen, a giant in the field, who is identified as a biophysical chemist. I then closed my section by discussing the usefulness and limits of definitions and whether or not there was a ‘hard’ boundary between Life and Non-Life, and made an allusion to the importance of rhetoric in how one thinks about this question.

My colleague in Rhetoric discussed the unity-diversity of knowledge starting from ancient Greece, how the liberal arts were defined and represented in the middle ages, and how disciplinary structures arose as we moved into the modern eras. There was a cool activity where students looked at different visual representations of the liberal arts (literacy levels were low) in medieval times and had students think about what was being represented in the artwork. She talked about the role and uses of rhetoric, conversation and dialogue – how the sciences and humanities have diverged to think about language and definitions differently. Finally, she brought things back to thinking about the definition of life.

I very much enjoyed participating and co-leading the open classroom discussion, and I hope the students found it interesting and enlightening. I think we accomplished our goal of discussing the liberal arts, the unity and diversity of knowledge, and showed some examples of how different disciplines interact with each other!

*Select answers: #3 is from Erwin Schrodinger, eminent physicist, who wrote a book What is Life? in 1944. #9 is from the Webster dictionary. #10 is from Manfred Eigen. #13 is the NASA panel definition from 1994.