Gerald Joyce no longer uses the NASA “must show Darwinian evolution” definition of life
Though he helped develop it. Recently, a problem has arisen round efforts to create a synthetic cell. Gerald Joyce, now of the Salk Institute, helped NASA come up with a very widely used definition of life, “Life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.” But, as medicl historian Rebecca Wilbanks explains at Aeon, In 2009, after decades of work, Joyce’s group published a paper in which they described an RNA molecule that could catalyse its own synthesis reaction to make more copies of itself. This chemical system met Joyce’s definition of life. But nobody wanted to claim that it was alive. We’d certainly have heard about it if they had. But Joyce no longer seems satisfied with that definition. For Read More ›