The dispute over what life is has divided natural philosophy from the seventeenth century onward. Vitalism (Bergson, Henri, 1907); (Hans Driesch, 1908) posited a non-material *élan vital* without which dead chemistry could not produce living systems. Mechanism, from Descartes through La Mettrie -(Julien Offray de La Mettrie, 1747) to the molecular biology revolution, responded that life is just chemistry: extra force is unnecessary. Each captures something the other misses, which is why the dispute never settles in either direction.

The disagreement survives in attenuated form in contemporary disputes over what counts as alive. NASA's working definition (Joyce, G. F., 1994) (a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution) picks out process rather than substrate, which allows it to cover life that might be nothing like Earth life; but standing disagreement remains over its boundary cases (viruses, prions, computer simulations of cells, synthetic biological systems) and over whether the definition's two components (self-sustaining; Darwinian evolution) are independent criteria or tightly coupled aspects of one structural fact.

A further dispute concerns the relationship among the three twentieth-century traditions that have each been tracking part of what life is: Schrödinger's -(Schrödinger, E., 1944) negative-entropy framing in *What is Life?*, Prigogine's dissipative-structures chemistry (Nicolis and Prigogine -(Prigogine, I., and G. Nicolis, 1977)), and Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis -(Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela, 1980). The traditions have developed largely in isolation, and the literature has not settled whether they are rival accounts, complementary perspectives on different aspects of life, or partial views of one underlying structural fact.

A fourth dispute, sharpened by recent origins-of-life research, concerns the kind of site at which the first closure formed, alkaline hydrothermal vents (Martin, W., and M. J. Russell, 2003); (Lane, N., 2015), warm-little-pond surface chemistry (Matthew W. Powner, Béatrice Gerland, John D. Sutherland, 2009); (Damer, B., and D. Deamer, 2020), mineral-surface catalysis (Wächtershäuser, G., 1988), or other redox-disequilibrium environments, and whether the first energy source was structurally constrained or contingent.

A fifth dispute, older than these and still live at biological scale, is the design inference: whether the specified, apparently irreducible complexity of molecular architecture can be generated by undirected dissipative and selective dynamics or instead licenses an inference to a designer. Behe's irreducible complexity and edge-of-evolution limits -(Michael J. Behe, 1996); -(Michael J. Behe, 2007), Dembski's design filter -(William A. Dembski, 1998), and Meyer's information argument -(Stephen C. Meyer, 2009) press that observable mechanisms describe such architecture without building it, while the biological mainstream (Sober -(Elliott Sober, 2008)) holds that they can. The present account takes the naturalistic side and engages the inference directly at [§5.1.6](<5.1.6 Intelligent Design.md>), with its cosmological-scale counterpart, the fine-tuning argument, at [§5.1.5](<5.1.5 Fine-Tuning Argument.md>); the sections here carry the generative half of that reply, how the immanent operators of change, composition, and constraint produce form rather than presuppose it.


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← [7.8 Life](<7.8 Life.md>) | [7.8.2 What is Required](<7.8.2 What is Required.md>) →
