O conceito de vida nas Ciências Biológicas

Abstract

What is life? This question has certainly spanned the history of civilization until the present day, prompting the search for answers, from the common man to scientists and philosophers. In ancient times, some philosophers admitted that it was a phenomenon of the enthelechy that animates matter. In the materialist vision, life is shown as a particular form of existence whose metabolic processes obey determined laws, verified through objective experience. Even so, this questioning remains until today, when space exploration, advanced information and communication technologies, and DNA manipulation, among other discoveries, are realities that also rekindle the debate under new aspects. In biology, life is constituted as a central empirical object with the dominant thesis that it is linked to a natural phenomenon, based on operational properties, which makes it difficult to define a concept of life, since this entity is a reification of the process of living. The present thesis aims to contribute on the problematic of the concept of life, through philosophical analysis for the conception of a concept that helps to overcome the problems of its formulation. With this, by means of the present research, some notions of life were rescued, starting from its origin, resorting to myths as an explanatory thesis, followed by the clash between vitalists and physicalists as a way of raising the theoretical aspects of this discussion, which intensified from the XVII century on. Still, as a result of this clash, organicism associated with emergentism, the philosophical position of this current, emerges as the third way in the attempt to explain the phenomenon of life. In this sequence, it was necessary to resort to the theory of concepts, delineating it from the domains of science, and more specifically in biology, considering its explanatory patterns because it is an autonomous science. Additionally, we endorsed and/or re-signified necessary requirements for the definition of the concept of life, such as generality, coherence, non-vitalistic, conceptual elegance, specificity, and the process as inherent to life. In order to organize and systematize the different conceptions of life and their respective authors, a chart was formulated, classifying them as strong, weak, and non-existent. Moreover, as a way of thematizing the present debate, reinforced by the COVID-19 pandemic, we resorted to viruses that do not fit the cell theory, being located on the borderline of life and non-life. Dupré's conceptions about collaborative metabolism and process ontology intermediated the proposition of a concept of life between strong and weak conceptions. As a conclusion of the present work, we suggest life as a hierarchy of collaborative biological processes, which mutually stabilize according to the contingencies present in the web of integrated systems, with the capacity to form lineages subject to selective pressures, resulting in negentropism, biological co-evolution and homeostasis. In doing so, we reaffirm the process in the continuum of life that sees in living systems, hierarchies of processes at a variety of temporal and spatial scales.