Biology asks, how does life work? Meta-biology or Philosophy of Biology asks, what is life, fundamentally? The meta of every science asks the bigger questions, it judges the fundamental assumptions upon which a science is built, it judges the historical evolution of that science. It questions its practices, theories and concepts; it asks, how much of it is facts and how much hypothesis?

But instead of questioning the fundamentals, tendencies towards materialism in the scientific community has reduced the Philosophy of Biology into a faculty focused on the idea of how to reduce biology into lower-level sciences such as chemistry and physics. With such a pre-determined goal in mind, wherein vitalism is simply not an option, the door is closed for any possible explanation for higher phenomena like the 'uniqueness of human intelligence', 'purposefulness in humanity, nature and the universe', and the 'uniqueness of life' itself.

So, simple biology talks of 'life' as an organised, self-maintaining, energy-using 'process' that preserves its own structure, interacts with its environment, carries heritable information, and belongs to a lineage capable of evolution. All these aspects seem to be physical, but as the physicist Erwin Schrodinger suggested, life is an ordered physical process that avoids decay by drawing order from the environment, while preserving and transmitting hereditary order through a molecular code – i.e. 'life' defies entropy, as the individual constantly and actively strives to maintain order within it as long as it is alive.

Life, then, is the force that inhabits a biological system that is........

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