The Theory of Life as Supple Adaptation. The Theory of Life as Supple Adaptation is provided by Mark A. Bedau at the Reed College in America. He supposed the definition of life as following：

“X is living iff

“X is a supplely adapting system, or

“X is explained in a right way by a supplely adapting system” (Bedau, 1998).

The standard in this theory to decide if a system is supplely adapting or not is not clear. Many non-living things are able to change variously, like river, cloud and sand hill. They can also be regarded as supple adaptation. It is not clear, either, that whether dead creatures and extinct creatures are supplely adapting systems.

What is more, the ability to supplely adapt is a result instead of reason. The ability of supple adaptation of life mainly comes from its enormously complex structure. It will be explained in this article that inheritance is the sufficient and necessary condition for life to maintain the complex structure. Breeding, therefore, is the sufficient and necessary condition of the ability of supple adaptation. Bedau did not point out the relation between breeding and supple adaptation.

The Theory of Life as Information. Jianhui Li claimed that the Theory of Life as Information pay attention to the delivery of information in the process of growth and breeding of life. An entity is life if it has the ability of self-reproduction or breeding in style of Von Neumann(Li, 2002, p37). This definition is right if the word “delivery of information” means self-reproduction or breeding. But Jianhui Li did not emphasize the special way of the delivery of information in life. Nor did he criticize teleology by the theory of breeding.

A lot of non-lives are able to deliver information. So the ability to deliver information is not the main standard to identify life. It is right to say that the essential property of life is information or delivery of information, but it is not right to say that the essential property of non-life is not information or delivery information. Only those who can deliver all structure information of themselves are life. Computers can deliver information, but most of these information have nothing to do with their own structure, or are not all structure information of themselves.