Christopher Pincock (Ohio State University)
There have been several attempts to make sense of the necessary features of life, not only as it happens to be on Earth, but as it must be anywhere it arises. These attempts seek some kind of "universal biology" that sometimes make links to universality explanations in physics. This paper considers one recent instance of this physics-inspired universal biology that aims to make sense of the genetic code (Goldenfeld, Biancalani and Jafarpour 2017). This case is used to support more general conclusions about the nature of explanations of universality.
