The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. §FreeRangeFrog^croak 23:40, 23 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Nature of life[edit]

Nature of life (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Hard to tell what this is exactly intended to be due to its incoherence. Certainly comes across as a essay-like POV fork of various articles, but in particular life, Meaning of life. A closer examination of the sourcing indicates various randomly selected scientists including at least some who aren't experts in relevant fields (i.e. biologists or psychologists), various physicists talking about biology, including one whackjob who is known for his utterly absurd ideas about anything biological (Hoyle), and one physicist who is so well known that he doesn't have a Wikipedia biography. (A completely arbitrary selection befitting an essay). Furthermore, the start point is also completely arbitrary "Starting in the 1930s, as physics, chemistry and biology were maturing as sciences, a number of scientists proposed thoughtful perspectives on the nature of life"; are we to believe that scientists only really started thinking about these things in the 1930s? Did Darwin not contemplate his tangled bank? Barney the barney barney (talk) 20:19, 16 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have now added an introductory paragraph indicating that there is little overlap in the information presented in Nature of life compared to the topics covered in Life and Meaning of life. The Nature of life article now cross-references articles on these other related topics. Thus I am not attempting to evade the spirit of NPOV, nor is it a POV fork.

I disagree that Fred Hoyle is a whackjob. He is a prominent English astronomer with many awards, and is noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis (see article Fred Hoyle). My inclusion of Hoyle’s ideas on the possible nature of extraterrestial life were not meant as an endorsement of those ideas but were included to make the point that life is not necessarily based on Earth-like chemistry. His ideas, presented in the novel The Black Cloud was described by the prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as "one of the greatest science fiction novels ever written."

Another criticism was including “one physicist who is so well known that he doesn't have a Wikipedia biography.” The two physicists quoted in Nature of life were Erwin Schrödinger and Fred Hoyle and both of them do have Wikipedia biographies. The criticism may have referred to Henry Quastler who was a physician (not a physicist) with a specialty in radiation biology and information theory as applied to biology. He died at a relatively young age shortly after publishing his book “The Emergence of Biological Organization.”

A further criticism is that I started with the 1930’s. I have now included in my new introductory paragraph an indication that the historical views on the nature of life may be found in the article Life and I have restricted my considerations to the evidence bearing on the current molecular biology perspective. Although I did not discuss Darwin explicitly, Darwin’s ideas are embedded in my extensive discussion of Richard E. Michod’s book “Darwinian Dynamics.”

Chaya5260 (talk) 01:51, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. Some obvious local problems (e.g. poor sourcing) but this is fundamentally not an encyclopedia article, but a secondary piece addressing a novel synthetic subject: no secondary sources collect and discuss these guys' notions like this. Alexbrn ^{talk|contribs|COI} 06:01, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete WP:ESSAY WP:OR --Salimfadhley (talk) 11:12, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete. Totally arbitrary collection of opinions, mainly about abiogenesis, which, of course, already has its own article. Some of it appears to be about the definition of life, which is covered in the Life article, to which the title could be redirected. While the article itself is incoherent, much of its content could be used on other articles. An article on Henry Quastler is probably warranted (his wife, the artist Gertrude Quastler, is also notable). Paul B (talk) 19:11, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 20:33, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete. There are other articles that cover the same topic that are better written. QuackGuru (talk) 21:17, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete': Personal essay, OR, synth. I highly doubt that reliable sources can be found. Nothing worth saving or merging. Can be deleted in its entirety. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 00:23, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Too late. I already co-opted some of it for Henry Quastler. Paul B (talk) 16:56, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Comment. It seems to me that this random jumble of opinions is a sort of scrap book of research possibly related to other projects that the editor who created it was working on at the time. I do not think it makes sense to keep this around in article space, but possibly some of the content could be used elsewhere or sandboxed and userfied so that the editor in question can try to produce some content that is suitable for inclusion in some existing article. That having been said, I basically agree that the main articles life and abiogenesis probably would not benefit by the addition of such content, even if it were to be drastically edited and condensed. Sławomir Biały (talk) 17:52, 18 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
• Delete Essay, no RS has this discussion, OR, no order, no focus, nonsense... - - MrBill3 (talk) 09:10, 19 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete per WP:ESSAY. Pretty simple really. St★lwart¹¹¹ 05:02, 20 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.