What Is Life
* Article: WHAT IS LIFE? Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. March 2, 1950
URL = https://archive.org/details/ScienceAndChrist/page/n210/mode/1up
Description
"Teilhard says life is not an anomaly, but a universal cosmic force that builds up complexity. He sees it complementing entropy, and the riddle to be solved lies in how they ultimately balance out."
(https://www.organism.earth/library/document/what-is-life-teilhard)
Excerpts
Teilhard de Chardin:
"In a quite general way, we might say that life (defined by its principal attributes of assimilation, reproduction, heredity, and consciousness) is now seen by science not as a physicochemical anomaly, but as the extreme form taken under certain conditions (a suitable temperature, a sufficiently long period of transformation etc.) by a universal, though generally disguised, property of the stuff of the cosmos. This amounts to saying that life can legitimately be regarded as having been continually present everywhere under pressure in the universe — coming to birth whenever and wherever it can — and, where it has once appeared, intensifying to its maximum in the immensities of Time and Space.
2. More precisely, life continually has a greater tendency to appear to us, scientifically, as a specific effect of corpuscular complexity, allied to the building up of very large and very complex particles. In spite of the existence of numerous critical thresholds, the curve that leads from large molecules to multicellular beings runs without any break in continuity: that being precisely the curve along which emerge (outside the play of chance and large numbers) the 'vital* effects of indeterminacy, self-arrangement, and consciousness."
(https://www.organism.earth/library/document/what-is-life-teilhard)