The Thermodynamics of Life
b'with @lifelikephysics, @vijaypande, and @omnivorousread\\n\\nWhere does life truly begin? How do we understand the fundamental nature of what is \\u201calive\\u201d and what is \\u201cnot alive\\u201d? In this episode of Bio Eats World, Professor Jeremy England discusses his new book, Every Life is on Fire, all about how what we might use physics to understand to be the origins of life\\u2014and how we define what being alive is.\\n\\nAs biologists, we are taught that life evolved as the result of Darwinian natural selection. But what happens if instead, you use a physicist\\u2019s lens to examine what life looks to be\\u2014and define it as a specialized order and relationship between matter and the patterns of it\\u2019s an environment? England\\u2014a senior director in artificial intelligence at GlaxoSmithKline, principal research scientist at Georgia Tech, former associate professor of physics at MIT, and one of Forbes\\u2019 \\u201c30 Under 30 Rising Stars of Science\\u201d\\u2014describes this new idea as \\u201cdissapative adaptation\\u201d. The conversation covers how looking at \\u201clife\\u201d in these terms changes what we understand to be alive and what the nature of "life" is; sheds new light on the \\u201cqueasy middle ground\\u201d between those definitions, especially in areas like machine learning and AI; and allows us to ask new questions about things like what makes DNA so special, and what life can do.'