Arnold De Loof 0103
Question: When you terminate the highest level of communication of a chicken, its cells can still be alive, but the chicken as such is dead. Is this right?
De Loof: Yes that is correct! That is an essential part of my approach to a definition of life. Life is always a characteristic of a compartment, and in biology one usually takes four levels: the cell organelle, the cell, the organism and the population. That is by far too simplistic. There are many more levels, and it took me quite a long time to find them all. And in particular to find out how they all relate to each other. I have identified at least 16 different levels.
But first of all, let us take our own body as an example. We are multicellular animals. We have cell organelles, like the mitochondria, which in fact correspond to bacteria. We have the eukaryotic cells. We have cells which are glued together by all sort of means: in animals these are organised in epithelia, and so on. And finally, we have the organism, with all its different organ systems, and in humans there is even an extra dimension, being the tools that we use, like computers! These are in fact mechanical extensions of the brain.
Then comes a next level, and this comprises all the compartments that consist of more then one, made up of different organisms but still belonging to the same species, like a colony. Another very well known one is the sexual compartment: there is a male and a female. They are in fact again another compartment. So there are numerous such compartments, like social compartments, which have played an extremely powerful role in evolution.
And then the last series of compartments, those made up of different organisms, also belonging to different species; a parasite in a host body, funghi, and so on. Each of these levels has it own form of life, so all of them can die.
A compartment dies at the moment it loses its ability to communicate at its highest level. Once this happens, it doesn't matter that all the other levels remain intact, from the perspective of our definition of life, this particular life form has died, because it is only the highest level of communication that matters.
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