The challenging biology of transients

Contemporary biology struggles to advance a systems' perspective to explain global emergent phenomena and, ultimately, how certain systems become alive. The production and study of transients that are somewhere between the inert and the living has become an important scientific goal, which is sometimes associated with the aim of designing living systems for practical application. This sets an additional difficulty to the already challenging task of defining what life is, as the research fields that are focused on such transitions need to consider that there are intermediary steps between non‐life and life, which are either gradual or punctuated. However, if the intention of building artificial living beings prevents us from thinking that there is a difference between life and non‐life, the scientific question of what life is could become meaningless.![][1] A recent Editorial in Nature commented as follows: “There is a popular notion that life is something that appears when a clear threshold is crossed. One might have hoped that such perceptions of a need for a qualitative difference between inert and living matter—such vitalism—would have been interred alongside the pre‐Darwinian belief that organisms are generated spontaneously from decaying matter” (Anon, 2007). Similar views claim that our definitions of life are historical, and are moulded by convictions or scientific practices that do not necessarily reflect natural categories.Conceptual changes in science affect the kinds of phenomenon that are brought to view. The notion of life emerged historically as a shift of perspective in the classification of nature and initiated the field of biology—as Michel Foucault showed, life does not establish an obvious threshold in nature but rather is a category adopted only at the end of the eighteenth century (Foucault, 1966). Owing to this fact, some authors conclude that life is not a natural kind to be unambiguously characterized by … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif