Life

 

So my friend decided to argue with me saying that rocks are living things.  His reasoning was that rocks take in nutrients, like calcium, and grow.  I personally think he's a nut and it's a bit absurd, and I believe that rocks cannot possibly be alive under any circumstance.  Using his own vocabulary against him, I think his theory is whack.

This lead me thinking, just like almost everything profound my friends say.

One of my favorite theories is by this guy named Erwin Shrodinger.  Are you familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics?  It's crazy.  It states that entropy (the gradual decline into disorder), while in an isolated system (an area in which there is no mass or heat exchange across its boundaries), never decreases, but will eventually evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium (a state of maximum entropy).  Erwin's theory is that living matter avoids this.  He doesn't say it lacks entropy, but it deters and slows it.  While we're alive, our body postpones its decay and stays solid.  When we die, our bodies decay and our atoms distribute evenly with its surroundings.

Anyway, living organisms are considered as open systems, because we can exchange energy and matter with their surroundings.  They are also considered as dissipative systems because they decrease entropy within them, and increase entropy in their environments.

We delay entropy mainly by metabolism, which is the process of taking in nutrients to complete tasks or activities, and then expelling waste byproducts.  So, metabolism creates order in the system and increases disorder outside of it.  In terms of metabolism, this happens when the spontaneous processes of catabolism (the breaking down of molecules into smaller molecules to cause the release of energy) and the non-spontaneous processes of anabolism (the building up of molecules into larger molecules using energy) are coupled.

So, living organisms take in materials, break them down to create energy, then use that energy to build up matter within them.   This process causes disorder (which is released as byproduct) outside the system, and creates order (which is the build up and increased complexity) within the system.

Do rocks do this?  Not necessarily.

Mrs. Grenn was my biology teacher in high school.  Just kidding.  It's actually an acronym.  MRS GRENN.  Movement, respiration, sensation, growth, reproduction, and nutritional needs.  All of these things are the prerequisites one thing must have to be considered living.

But not all living things "move," right?  I don't know.  Whatever.

Apparently there are over a hundred characteristics that help define whether something is living or not.  The most common and top three are that life reproduces, and uses energy, and those two actions are defined by instilled instructions (DNA).

So, I threw this at my friend: "Dude, rocks don't reproduce."  And he replied, "Yeah they do... a rock breaks in half, now there's two.  Reproduction."  In a way, he was right.  But I did some research, and now I'm pretty sure 1.) Rocks don't grow, 2.) Rocks don't use energy, and 3.) Rocks certainly don't have DNA that defines them, but are actually defined by the systems around it, and 4.) That form of "reproduction" doesn't count because it's not originated from a DNA sequence, but usually from another system acting upon it.

I guess amid all these random facts and thoughts, I've developed my definition of life.

Life must have these characteristiscs:

-Metabolism takes place.  There are nutritional needs by the organism.

-Because of metabolism taking place, order increases within the system and disorder increase outside of it.

-This process of metabolism takes place because of written instructions (DNA).

-It responds to its environment (rocks don't, by the way)

-It's self-contained, so enclosed by cell membranes.

-It has a genetic molecule (its instructions, or DNA, if you will).

-It can evolve as per its instructions, and reproduce.

And that's my list.  All of these things, by the way, are things rocks don't do, but a human being does.  So there, buddy.  Rocks aren't living things, nice try :)

Just some rock for thought, and this will build the foundation for future posts.  I hope you enjoyed my attempt to understand and then relay my interpretation of some biology lingo.  :D

 

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Sources: Wikipedia, totally, like a boss.