Talk:Life/Draft

Formating decisions

Citation style as per Help:Citation style David Tribe 01:25, 5 February 2007 (CST)

Other style standards?

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General copy discussion

In response to Larry Sanger's request, let's go about rewriting this article. For the purposes of the article, I suggest that we take the meaning of life to be equivalent to living things, and the opposite of death, and also of inanimate things or objects. Some points to cover: (1) features of living things v. inanimate things,(2) definition of death - when is something alive no longer alive? (3) which organic molecule collections have life? which don't? why? Nancy Sculerati MD 17:38, 30 December 2006 (CST)

• I note David Tribe working on this article. I added a subsection "Linguistic Considerations Relating to the Definition of Life". I may presume too much in this case, but it does speak to Nancy Sculerati's suggestion to "...take the meaning of life to be equivalent to living things...". Happy to delete or put somewhere else in article or elsewhere. --Anthony.Sebastian (Talk) 16:49, 3 February 2007 (CST)

• I also re-wrote the first paragraph of the Introduction, to provide a generalization that could set the stage for describing what we know about the common characteristics of living things. --Anthony.Sebastian (Talk) 19:11, 3 February 2007 (CST)

Thermodynamics

The intro is massive and should probably be much smaller. I usually consider them more like an abstact than an intro commmonly seen in academic papers. One way around this is to move most of the thermodynamic perspectives into a new section. Chris Day (Talk) 02:01, 5 February 2007 (CST)

• Chris: Will take your suggestion and try additional tacks to shorten Intro. Thanks. --Anthony.Sebastian (Talk) 19:25, 5 February 2007 (CST)

Re-writing per Larry's Request

I have undertaken to re-write this article from the beginning, responding to suggestions along the way. I have re-written the following sections/subsections:

• Introduction
• Shared Characteristics of Living Things: Systems and Thermodynamic Perspectives
• Some Definitions of Life Resonating with the Preceding Exposition
• Other Shared Characteristics of Living Things
• Life Further Characterized (partial)

I will try to come to an intermediate closure soon, so the workgroup can consider the article for approval--with the idea that, like Biology, refinements and amplifications will find their way in.

--Anthony.Sebastian (Talk) 17:43, 12 February 2007 (CST)