TT2: What is life? A 21st-century reassessment
March 02-07, 2025
Oratorio di Barottoli
Despite tremendous progress in our understanding of what life DOES (metabolism, genetics, physiology), our understand of what life IS remains unclear. The origin of life on Earth, the transition from non-living to living matter—from inert matter to matter with intentionality—remains a deep mystery. How does chemistry become sentient? We revisit this topic, bringing in experts from the sciences but also from philosophy and other approaches to the “science of life” to gauge our current understanding and challenges. Of crucial importance are current and future developments of bioengineering and the genetic manipulation of life, its ethical implications and its impact on the environment.
PARTICIPANTS
-
Philip Ball is a British science writer. For over twenty years he has been an editor of the journal Nature, for which he continues to write regularly. He is a regular contributor to Prospect magazine and a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and BBC Future.
-
Melanie Challenger is a writer, researcher and broadcaster on environmental history and philosophy of science, Deputy Co-Chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and a Vice President of the RSPCA, UK. She wrote How to Be Animal: What it Means to Be Human (2021).
-
Robert Miller Hazen is an American mineralogist and astrobiologist. He is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, in the United States. Hazen is the Executive Director of the Deep Carbon Observatory.
-
Roberta Raffaetà is associate professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Deputy Director of NICHE (The New Institute: The Centre for Environmental Humanities). She studies the multiple ways people assign value to life in a world where humans and non-humans are interdependent, with a focus on how science is transforming in response to eco-social challenges and technological revolutions. Her work lies at the intersection of medical anthropology, environmental anthropology/political ecology, science and technology studies and art.
-
Paul Vanouse is an artist working in Emerging Media forms and a SUNY Distinguished Professor at the University at Buffalo. Radical interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his practice. Since the early 1990s his artwork has addressed complex issues raised by varied new techno-sciences using these very techno-sciences as a medium. His artworks have included data collection devices that examine the ramifications of polling and categorization, genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of race and identity, and temporary organizations that playfully critique institutionalization and corporatization. These "Operational Fictions" are hybrid entities--simultaneously real things and fanciful representations--intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary electronic landscape.
-
Andreas Weber studied biology, specializing in marine ecology, and philosophy in Berlin, Hamburg, and Freiburg. His doctoral thesis, Natur als Bedeutung, explores a semiotic theory of life. As a freelance journalist, he has contributed to various German media outlets and now works as a writer and lecturer at the Berlin University of the Arts. He is the author of several books, including Alles fühlt (2007), Lebendigkeit (2014), and Indigenialität (2018). In his nonfiction works, Weber challenges the mechanistic view of life and has received multiple awards for his journalistic and philosophical contributions.
RELATED CONTENT
ESSAYS & ARTICLES
A response to ‘Biological agency: a concept without a research program’
Philip Ball, 2024
How Life Really Works (article)
Philip Ball, 2023
We are not machines (article)
Philip Ball, 2024
Uncanny Ecologies – More-than-Natural, More-than-Human, More-than-Secular
Mayanthi Fernando, 2023
The Voyage of Life
Robert M. Hazen, 2025
Themes and Variations in Complex Systems
Robert M. Hazen and Niles Eldredge, 2010
Re-conceptualizing the origins of life
Sara I. Walker, N. Packard and G. D. Cody, 2025
On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems
Michael L. Wong, Carol E. Cleland, Daniel Arend Jr., Stuart Bartlett, H. James Cleaves II, Heather Demarest, Anirudh Prabhu, Jonathan I. Lunine, and Robert M. Hazen
Open-ended versus bounded evolution: Mineral evolution as a case study
Robert M. Hazen and Michael L. Wong
Life as Aftermath: Social Theory for an Age of Anthropogenic Biology
Hannah Landecker
Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality
Andreas Weber and Francisco J. Varela
Urge and Molecular Biology
Dr. Peter T. Mora, 1963
Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations
Michelle Murphy, 2017
Semantic Information in a Model of Resource Gathering Agents
Damian R. Sowinski, Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Robert N. Markwick, Jordi Piñero, Marcelo Gleiser, Artemy Kolchinsky, Gourab Ghoshal, and Adam Frank
Difference, Sameness and DNA (Chapters 1, 3, and 8)
Paul Vanouse, 2024
Kincentric Ecology: Indigenous Perceptions of the Human-Nature Relationship
Enrique Salmón, 2010
Seeing, Feeling, and Hearing the World. A Regenerative Worldview: Rinyi, Pirlirr and Liyan
Kankawa Nagarra [Olive] Knight, Anne Poelina, and Sandra Wooltorton, 2024
Interdependence: Biology and Beyond
Kriti Sharma, 2015
Why Psyche Matters: Psychological Implications of Santayana's Ontology
Jessica Wahman, 2006
Beyond Emptiness – 'Compassion' as the Hidden Ground of Francisco Varela's Thinking
Andreas Weber, 2023
Sustaining fecundity: artistic creation as care for life
Andreas Weber, 2023
To unravel the origin of life, treat findings as pieces of a bigger puzzle
Nick Lane and Joana C. Xavier, 2024
PODCASTS & INTERVIEWS
