Introduction: paradigms in science and society

Questions about the origin, nature, and meaning of life are as old as humanity itself. Indeed, they lie at the very roots of philosophy and religion. The earliest school of Greek philosophy, known as the Milesian school, made no distinction between animate and inanimate, nor between spirit andmatter. Later on, the Greeks called those early philosophers “hylozoists,” or “those who think that matter is alive.” The ancient Chinese philosophers believed that the ultimate reality, which underlies and unifies the multiple phenomena we observe, is intrinsically dynamic. They called it Tao – the way, or process, of the universe. For the Taoist sages all things, whether animate or inanimate, were embedded in the continuous flow and change of the Tao. The belief that everything in the universe is imbued with life has also been characteristic of indigenous spiritual traditions throughout the ages. In monotheistic religions, by contrast, the origin of life is associated with a divine creator. In this book, we shall approach the age-old questions of the origin and nature of life from the perspective of modern science.We shall see that even within that much narrower context the distinction between living and nonliving matter is often problematic and somewhat arbitrary. Nevertheless, modern science has shown that the vast majority of living organisms exhibit fundamental characteristics that are strikingly different from those of nonliving matter. To fully appreciate both the achievements and limitations of the new scientific conception of life – the subject of this book – it will be useful first to clarify the nature and limitations of science itself. The modern word “science” is derived from the Latin scientia, which means “knowledge,” a meaning that was retained throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the era of the Scientific Revolution. What we call “science” today was known as “natural philosophy” in those earlier epochs. For example, the full title of the Principia, IsaacNewton’s famouswork, published in 1687, which became the foundation of science in subsequent centuries, was Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (“The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”). The modern meaning of science is that of an organized body of knowledge acquired through a particular method known as the scientific method. This modern understanding evolved gradually during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The characteristics of the