Let's begin with the strange life cycle of a mite called Demodex folliculorum. It can only live on humans, particularly their faces, has sex at the top of the hair follicle, eats hair oil, and because it has no anus, dies on your face when it can't eat no more because its body is literally packed with crap. For this life form, every meal is one step closer to death. The faster the thing eats, the closer it is to the nothingness on the other side of everything (life). The universe for the Demodex folliculorum is only there for 14-16 days.

Now, where is God to be found in this curious human mite, which is also a home for a number of bacteria? Did He really make it? Did He think: "And now I will create a mite that has no anus. Let's see how that goes down."? Demodex folliculorum is not a problem for evolution (its life cycle, as short as it is, and sad as it ends, still makes sense), but it makes nonsense of the idea that life is designed by some intelligent being that is outside of reality (or experience).

That said, biology also has a big problem (the subject of this post). It's teleology, or, put another way, purpose. Life is so much about purpose that the surprise is scientists have not defined it as hard a law as gravity. True, this law does not exist until matter is directed, by the use of energy, to a kind of stability that is highly improbable. The Australian chemist Addy Pross calls it dynamic kinetic stability (DSK). It is at odds with the general machinery of the universe, which is winding down to a condition that is highly probable and we call, from our point of view, which is the stunning order of life, disordered. Without the law of purpose, you could not recognize life as we understand and experience it. But if you look at one of the leading definitions of life, NASA's ("A self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution"), you find no purpose in it.

Indeed, if you read the new Handbook of Astrobiology, which Vera M. Kolb edited, and has excellent contributions (like "Viruses in the Origin of Life and Its Subsequent Diversification" by the much-neglected virologist Luis P. Villarreal), you will not find one definition life that includes purpose. There is mention of teleonomy, Pross' word of purpose ("Teleonomy is evident at all levels of life, from the single-cell to multicellular levels. As one example, bacteria 'swim' toward a high-glucose region, in search for food. Pross points out the similarity between the teleonomic character of life and life’s élan vital, which is a discredited concept.") But when describing life, the usual suspects appear: Darwinian evolution, reproduction, metabolism, enclosure.

In the second chapter, "Defining Life Multiple Perspectives," the book's editor, Vera M. Kolb, presents an almost endless list of definitions from scientific and popular sources. It is:

The quality that distinguishes a vital and functional being from a dead body; b: a principle or force that is considered to underlie the distinctive quality of animate beings (compare vitalism); c: an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction … 5 a: the period from birth to death (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, Tenth Edition, 1993).

Any definition of life that is useful must be measurable. We must define life in terms that can be turned into measurables and then turn these into a strategy that can be used to search for life. So, what are these? (1) structures; (2) chemistry; (3) replication with fidelity; and (4) evolution (Nealson, 2002; source Popa 2004).

Life is a metabolic network within a boundary (Maturana and Varela, 1980; reformulated by Luisi, 1993; source Popa 2004). All that is living must be based on autopoiesis, and if a system is discovered to be autopoietic, that system is defined as living; that is, it must correspond to the definition of minimal life (Maturana and Varela 1980).

A living system is a system capable of self-production and self-maintenance through a regenerative network of processes that takes place within a boundary of its own making and regenerates itself through cognitive or adaptive interactions with the medium

Life is a historical process “as the mode of existence of ribosome encoding organisms (cells) and capsid
encoding organisms (viruses) and their ancestors” (Forterre 2010).

And the list goes on and on, and nowhere to be found is a mention of purpose. But if I was to offer a working definition for the discovery of life in the universe, the goal of astrobiology, it would be: Organized matter that has a purpose. That is it. No need for reproduction, which of course is not the case for lots of animals. Also I'm not sure if Darwinism operates at the level of bacteria because of lateral gene transfer.

In fact, the great and late molecular biologist Carl Woese not only discovered the three domains of life but also separated the history of life into two parts: Before Darwin and after Darwin. The pre-Darwinian world still exists, according to his brilliant essay "A New Biology for a New Century," but in history, there was only one world, one living entity that Sorin Sonea and Maurice Panisset called in their 1983 book A New Bacteriology a "superorganism." The passage from that state, superorganism, to the one us animals are accustomed to, Woese calls the Darwinian threshold. But the superorganism is still with and around us today.

But why this refusal to state the obvious? That life has, above all, a purpose. Because biology, which, as a science, made its first appearance in an age still dominated by Newtonian time (absolute) and matter (mechanistic), has struggled without rest to separate itself from God and all of its nettlesome theologians, particular those that try to look respectable (intelligent design), it has undone itself. And so what we have is something that the philosopher Thomas Nagel recognized: a science that's failing to appreciate its subject, which is, to use the words of Pross, "very bizarre indeed."

Nagel, a secular thinker, is even sympathetic with the theologians because biologists, such as Richard Dawkins, don't have the imagination to leave, among other things, the safety of Darwin, who relegated the origin of life to the mists. Dawkins pretty much does the same today, the age of systems biology and, according to Pross, chemistry. But Nagel knows biology needs the bravery to say things that are clearly scientific but will, sadly, will excite the theologians. Nagel calls purpose natural teleology.

But here is the thing. Because purpose is not possible without matter, it must be made sense of (understood) by matterr—purpose (a theological favorite) and also thought/mind/consciousness (theology calls it spirit or soul). These two properties of life are nowhere outside of nature (I call nature matter), but in it, and can only emerge and exist from it.

From Pross's 2012 book, What is Life?: How Chemistry Becomes Biology:

Evolution is the process by which all properties of matter are exploited in the evolutionary drive toward more effective replicating systems. Evolution exploits matter’s propensity for hardness when that is useful, as in bones. It exploits matter’s ability to be flexibly firm when that is needed, as in cartilage; matter’s ability to be liquid when that is needed, as in blood; matter’s ability to be transparent as in crystallin, the protein from which the lens of the eye is made; matter’s ability to conduct electric charge, and so on. But it turns out that matter in some particular organization has an even more remarkable characteristic—the remarkable property of consciousness. Indeed, an extraordinary characteristic—matter can be self-aware. Evolution has discovered that capability of matter, like all others that it has come across, and utilized it in the ongoing search for stable replicating entities. If we want to understand consciousness and its basis, we should study its source—neural activity at its most rudimentary level, and then track the phenomenon, step by step, through to its more advanced manifestations, ultimately to us humans.

I would not say "ultimately," but you get the picture. An anal-less mite has awareness and a purpose.