More Than Life Itself

A. H. Louie's "More Than Life Itself" is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organisation of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterisation of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialisation of mechanism, but an expansive generalisation of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings.