Most attempts to define life have concentrated on individual theories, mentioning others
hardly at all, but here we compare all of the major current theories. We begin by asking how …

With the aim of better understanding the nature of metabolism in the first cells and the
relationship between the origin of life and the origin of metabolism, we propose three criteria …

In this work we attempt to find out the extent to which realistic prebiotic compartments, such
as fatty acid vesicles, would constrain the chemical network dynamics that could have …

Abstract Robert Rosen's (M, R) system is an abstract biological network architecture that is
allegedly non-computable on a Turing machine. If (M, R) is truly non-computable, there are …

Disagreement over whether life is inevitable when the conditions can support life remains
unresolved, but calculations show that self-organization can arise naturally from purely …

Abstract The theoretical biologist Robert Rosen developed a highly original approach for
investigating the question “What is life?”, the most fundamental problem of biology …

The goal of synthetic biology is to create artificial organisms. To achieve this it is essential to
understand what life is. Metabolism-replacement systems, or (M, R)-systems, constitute a …

Abstract Background Robert Rosen's Metabolism-Replacement, or (M, R), system can be
represented as a compact network structure with a single source and three products derived …

Here, we address the consequences of the extension in the space of a simple model of a
system that is closed to efficient causation: the (M, R)-system model. To do so, we use a …

This chapter describes a practical procedure to dissect metabolic systems, simplify them,
and use or derive enzyme rate equations in order to build a mathematical model of a …