Some very high-level background about cell-biology for my talk on Cultural Metabolism and LLMs on wheels at Prague earlier this year.
According to Paul Nurse:
- Living things are bounded physical entities
- The bounded entity is the chemical and informational machine
- This chemical and informational machine has a hereditary system
- The system prefigures how the entity works
- But has in-built variability to respond to its environment (epigenetics)
- The entity can therefore evolve by natural selection
- The living thing can have purpose of being better adapted to the life state it finds itself
From his book: What is Life?