Is Life Just Different? Quanta Explores Fundamental Questions of Biology

For as long as humans have wondered at the difference between a stone and a seed, the question of what separates the living from the non-living has resisted clean answers. Quanta Magazine now revisits this ancient puzzle through a modern lens, asking whether life is a distinct category of existence or simply matter that has learned, through complexity, to organize itself in self-sustaining ways. The investigation suggests that the properties we call life — reproduction, adaptation, memory — may emerge naturally from ordinary physics and chemistry, not from any special or separate principle. If