How Life Works
All the same, Berzelius added a fruitful notion. Rather than postulate some “vital force”—“a word to which we can affix no idea”—we should recognize that “this power to live belongs not to the constituent parts of our bodies, nor does it belong to them as an instrument, neither is it a simple power; but the result of the mutual operation of the ins
... See morePhilip Ball • How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology
By promoting self-organization, energy flux gradually converts a clump of mindless molecules into information-processing machinery with agency—meaning the self-drive and purposeful action that we associate with life.
Bobby Azarian • The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity
As we discuss in Section 4.3, the essential properties of a living system are emergent properties – properties that are not found in any of the parts but emerge at the level of the system as a whole.
Fritjof Capra • The Systems View of Life
