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  1. The nature of life: classical and contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science.Mark Bedau & Carol Cleland (eds.) - 2010 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Bringing together the latest scientific advances and some of the most enduring subtle philosophical puzzles and problems, this book collects original historical and contemporary sources to explore the wide range of issues surrounding the nature of life. Selections ranging from Aristotle and Descartes to Sagan and Dawkins are organised around four broad themes covering classical discussions of life, the origins and extent of natural life, contemporary artificial life creations and the definition and meaning of 'life' in its most general form. (...)
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  • What is Life?Mark A. Bedau - 2008 - In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. Blackwell. pp. 455–471.
    This chapter contains section titled: The Fascination of Life The Phenomena of Life Puzzles about Life Accounts of Life The Problem of Understanding Life References Further Reading.
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  • Understanding life: Recent work in philosophy of biology.Kim Sterelny - 1995 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (2):155-183.
    This paper surveys recent philosophy of biology. It aims to introduce outsiders to the field to the recent literature (which is reviewed in the footnotes) and the main recent debates. I concentrate on three of these: recent critiques of the replicator/vehicle distinction and its application to the idea of the gene as the unit of section; the recent defences of group selection and the idea that standard alternatives to group selection are in fact no more than a disguised form of (...)
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  • Essay Review: The Tormenting Desire for Unity.Ernst Mayr & Edward O. Wilson - 1999 - Journal of the History of Biology 32 (2):385-394.
  • The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance.Ernst Mayr - 1982 - Harvard University Press.
    Explores the development of the ideas of evolutionary biology, particularly as affected by the increasing understanding of genetics and of the chemical basis of inheritance.
  • Collective Intelligence of the Artificial Life Community on Its Own Successes, Failures, and Future.Steen Rasmussen, Michael J. Raven, Gordon N. Keating & Mark A. Bedau - 2003 - Artificial Life 9:207-235.
    We describe a novel Internet-based method for building consensus and clarifying con icts in large stakeholder groups facing complex issues, and we use the method to survey and map the scienti c and organizational perspectives of the arti cial life community during the Seventh International Conference on Arti cial Life (summer 2000). The issues addressed in this survey included arti cial life’s main successes, main failures, main open scienti c questions, and main strategies for the future, as well as the (...)
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  • A Giant Step Towards Artificial Life?David Deamer - 2005 - Trends in Biotechnology 23 (7):336--338.
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  • Four puzzles about life.Mark Bedau - manuscript
    To surmount the notorious difficulties of defining life, we should evaluate theories of life not by whether they provide necessary and sufficient conditions for our current preconceptions about life but by how well they explain living phenomena and how satisfactorily they resolve puzzles about life. On these grounds, the theory of life as supple adaptation (Bedau 1996) gets support from its natural and compelling resolutions of the following four puzzles: (1) How are different forms of life at different levels of (...)
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  • The nature of life.Mark A. Bedau - 1996 - In Margaret A. Boden (ed.), The Philosophy of Artificial Life. Oxford University Press. pp. 332--357.
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