[____tom____]

No, none of those can mutate, that's the point of "and mutate heritably"

Crystals can "reproduce", but it's always the same (there can be errors, but they don't inherit), so they don't count.

And atoms don't reproduce, so I'm missing your point there.

[3cats-in-a-coat]

Reproduction in time and reproduction in space are connected. If atoms couldn't reproduce (I can sense most readers knee-jerking reading this), they'd be all unique, wouldn't they. And yet they aren't.

You could say "they have no heritability", and not the way you expect, I guess, but they all inherit the same local laws of physics, and they may even impact those laws, thus forming a feedback loop, and clearly there are googols of them in clusters, same weight, same energy, same polarity, same properties, same states, much like you see with any other species in nature, in fact in far lesser numbers.

If robots are made in a factory, does this count as reproduction? If not, why not. Does a mother's womb not resemble a "baby factory". A baby does not create itself. Always something else creates you.

We have clusters of "common sense" about these things, and most of what I said immediately sounds stupid to "common sense". Yet common sense falls apart if you start thinking about it. But Internet is not EXACTLY conductive to "thinking about it". It's all about the hot takes and the current consensus. Then time passes, and that consensus seems truly unenlightened.