Sciences, politiques institutionnelles et public

Pietro Corsi, directeur d’étudesDonato Bergandi, Florence Raulin-Cerceau, maîtres de conférences au Muséum national d’histoire naturelle Compte rendu non communiqu

Sciences, politiques institutionnelles et public

Pietro Corsi, directeur d’étudesDonato Bergandi, Florence Raulin-Cerceau, maîtres de conférences au Museum national d’histoire naturelle Théories de l’évolution de Lamarck à Stephen Jay Gould L’horizon chronologique et thématique de notre séminaire, qui voit la participation de plusieurs collègues du Muséum d’histoire naturelle, nous permet d’aborder chaque année des questions concernant l’histoire des théories de l’évolution ainsi que les débats les plus récents. Au niveau de l’histoire des ..

Histoire de l'exobiologie

L’essor de l’exploration spatiale dans le système solaire ainsi que le développement des recherches dans le domaine de l’origine de la vie sur Terre ont fourni les bases de l’exobiologie. En quelques décennies, ce champ pluridisciplinaire s’est considérablement élargi et structuré autour d’une large communauté de chercheurs. Par ailleurs, les découvertes d’exoplanètes, en particulier les « exo-terres » susceptibles d’être habitables, ont ouvert à d’autres perspectives. Ces avancées sont en voie de concrétiser l’une des quêtes les plus exaltantes de l’humanité : la recherche d’une autre vie dans l’univers.Developments in space exploration in the solar system and in the scientific field of the origin of life on Earth have laid the foundations of exobiology. In the space of a few decades, this multidisciplinary field has considerably expanded and structured itself around a wide community of researchers. Besides this, discovering exoplanets, especially potentially habitable Earth-like ones, has widely opened new prospects. All these scientific advances are bringing us closer and closer to realising one of the most exalting quests of humanity: the search for another life form in the universe

Defining Life

This Special Issue of Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres contains papers based on the contributions presented at the Conference "Defining Life" held in Paris (France) on 4-5 February, 2008. The main objective of this Conference was to confront speakers from several disciplines--chemists, biochemists, biologists, exo/astrobiologists, computer scientists, philosophers and historians of science--on the topic of the definition of life. Different viewpoints of the problem approached from different perspectives have been expounded and, as a result, common grounds as well as remaining diverging arguments have been identified. In addition to individual talks, two large roundtables gave ample room for speakers to discuss their diverging viewpoints. This volume collects almost all the contributions presented during the Conference and provides a rich spectrum of renewed answers to the ever-standing question "What is Life?". Besides the arguments directly regarding this question, more philosophical or historical reflections are also proposed in this issue that were not presented during the Conference. This volume also offers a synthesis written by J. Gayon taking each contribution into account. To conclude this foreword, we would like to thank all the participants and speakers who made this Conference a most stimulating event. Each provided novel ideas to "Defining Life" while highlighting the extreme difficulty to reach a consensus on this topic. We are also very grateful to the French CNRS Interdisciplinary Program Origines des Planètes et de la Vie (Origins of Planets and Life) for its generous support, as well as to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris for hosting the Conference. We also thank Alan W. Schwartz for generously offering this space for publishing the Proceedings of the Conference