"The Correct Application of the Laws of Life"

Life has always been – and it still is – a puzzle that defies decoding

and demystification.                                                    ––Yunus A. Çengel

What are the "Laws of Life"?

Arthur Pauls coined the name Ortho-Bionomy from Greek roots and never elucidated what specific laws he had in mind. It was a poetic and allusive coinage. 

There are many books and essays published under the title of "Laws of LIfe" and most are opinions about moral behavior. In science, among biologists, there is little agreement as to what life is and what "laws" it is subject to. Life seems to avoid being codified.

For instance, is a virus a living thing or not? Most biologists say no. Yunus Çengal, professor of mechanical engineering, says yes, a virus is a living thing. For what it's worth I agree with Professor Çengal on this point (though I question at least one of his points. I will be referencing his article, "Eighteen Distinctive Characteristics of Life," which can be found online(hyperlinked here).

What is Life?

We know from Gaston Bachellard's phenomenological analysis that Life is round. Of course, it has to be because Life is interiority. 

Life is the inside of the world. Deleuze and Guattari write of the "desiring machine" presumably as some aspect of life. I won't try to explain D&G but pause at the comic effect of these two words juxtaposed. The phrase desiring machine seems an oxymoron if one thinks of a machine that is desiring something. Perhaps the machine is to be desired, as "I desire a machine." Or is it saying something like, "A living organism has machine-like qualities but it has this added feature that it desires." Is it lampooning in a subtle way the mechanical view of the universe (William Blake called it "Newton's Sleep)? Regardless, there is desire; whatever one calls the particular arrangement of molecules in a pattern that persists over time, it displays purpose, it is appetitive, which to say it has desire, it hungers. From the simplest organisms to the most complex there is a preference for this over that.

Life is dynamic kinetic stability; a pattern that persists over time by changing.

 

References

What is life?  Erwin Schrodinger. 1944, 2012 edition with an introduction by Roger Penrose.

What is LIfe?  J.B.S. Haldane. 1949

What is LIfe?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology. Addy Pross. 2012.

The Poetics of Space. Gaston Bachelard. 1957, reprinted 2014.

Eighteen Distinctive Characteristics of Life. Yunas A. Çengal. 2023.

 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10123176/#:~:text=In%20biology%2C%20it%20is%20generally,be%20responsive%20to%20the%20environment.

Discovering the Laws of Life. John Marks Templeton (forward by Norman Vincent Peale). 1995