Abstract
Modern biology generally views organisms as beads along the necklace of lineage. It attempts to explain life from an evolutionary viewpoint, with reproduction (of cells) and replication (of DNA) as defining phenomena. On the other hand, systems biology studies each bead per se as an autonomous entity. Therefore, for systems biology, the defining difference between a living organism and any nonliving object should be that an organism is a system of material components that are organized in such a way that the system can autonomously and continuously fabricate itself, meaning it can live longer than the lifetimes of all its individual components. Systems biology, therefore, goes beyond the properties of individual biomolecules, taking seriously their organization into a living whole. Experts propose an epistemology for systems biology that is essentially relational and views everything that happens inside a living cell in the context of a functional organization that makes self-fabrication possible.
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