Reed Bender, Karina Kofman, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Michael Levin

The question of “what is life?” has challenged scientists and philosophers for centuries, producing an array of definitions that reflect both the mystery of its emergence and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the question. Despite significant progress in our understanding of biological systems, psychology, computation, and information theory, no single definition for life has yet achieved universal acceptance. This challenge becomes increasingly urgent as advances in synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and astrobiology challenge our traditional conceptions of what it means to be alive. We undertook a methodological approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyze a set of definitions of life provided by a curated set of cross-disciplinary experts. We used a novel pairwise correlation analysis to map the definitions into distinct feature vectors, followed by agglomerative clustering, intra-cluster semantic analysis, and t-SNE projection to reveal underlying conceptual archetypes. This methodology revealed a continuous landscape of the themes relating to the definition of life, suggesting that what has historically been approached as a binary taxonomic problem should be instead conceived as differentiated perspectives within a unified conceptual latent space. We offer a new methodological bridge between reductionist and holistic approaches to fundamental questions in science and philosophy, demonstrating how computational semantic analysis can reveal conceptual patterns across disciplinary boundaries, and opening similar pathways for addressing other contested definitional territories across the sciences.

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Sai Krishna Katla, Chenyu Lin, and Juan Pérez-Mercader

PNAS 122 (22) e2412514122

Self-reproduction is one of the most fundamental features of natural life. This study introduces a biochemistry-free method for creating self-reproducing polymeric vesicles. In this process, nonamphiphilic molecules are mixed and illuminated with green light, initiating polymerization into amphiphiles that self-assemble into vesicles. These vesicles evolve through feedback between polymerization, degradation, and chemiosmotic gradients, resulting in self-reproduction. As vesicles grow, they polymerize their contents, leading to their partial release and their reproduction into new vesicles, exhibiting a loose form of heritable variation. This process mimics key aspects of living systems, offering a path for developing a broad class of abiotic, life-like systems.

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