[davisp]

A wild tangent but reading “heritable metabolizing” really hit me on the “are viruses alive” question.

I’ve been around enough biotech to have considered the differences between plasmids and viruses versus archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes. I’ve always considered “heritable change” as the base definition of “life”. As in, “life” is progeny resemble their parent(s)? Or “heritable change”.

“Heritable metabolizing” quite nicely captures that difference between the levels of single molecule “life” and singular/multicellular “life”.

Apologies for the random aside, it was just one of those random “I have a vague idea of why mitochondria are important, but I don’t see them as fundamental” parts of my “What is life?” definition being refined.

[mncharity]

> “heritable change” as the base definition of “life”

I years ago saw a research talk by someone doing, IIRC, regional-sized evolutionary-time-duration multi-scale ecosystem simulation - they made the same call.