why the pseudo? it seems living rather than pseudo-living. it needs a particular environment, but that's true of a lot of living things.
The definition of living by most biologists wouldn't include a strand of genetic material. Fire replicates in particular environments, as do viruses. But we don't typically classify either as living.
I think the point you're getting at is that the distinction between living and non-living is a bit arbitrary and meaningless. I agree.
A crystals arrangement of its microscopic structure will always be the same, as will the oxidation reaction in fire.
A virus undergoes darwinian evolution and will adapt to its environment
Spiegelman's monster isn't alive under any common definition of alive, but it has fascinating properties nonetheless and appears to be an attractor in the RNA sequence space, which is quite interesting on its own.
- Diamonds move through the earth (since the earth itself is not static), grow, and split. This means they move and reproduce. Are they alive?
- Prions are proteins that reproduce directly, by bumping into other proteins and forming them into prions. Are they alive?
The general run of thought that I'm familiar with is that bacteria are unambiguously alive, viruses are ambiguously alive, and diamonds are unambiguously not alive. Prions would go somewhere on the scale between viruses and diamonds. I would personally rate the monster below prions in terms of "being alive"; it doesn't surprise me to see it called "pseudo-living".
Interesting you say that. I was always taught that viruses fell into the "not alive" category.
There is no "not alive" category; that is the long-discredited philosophy of vitalism. It's purely a question of how you choose to do your analysis.
But I'll leave you with a selection from the wikipedia article "Virus":
Opinions differ on whether viruses are a form of life, or organic structures that interact with living organisms. They have been described as "organisms at the edge of life", since they resemble organisms in that they possess genes, evolve by natural selection, and reproduce by creating multiple copies of themselves through self-assembly. Although they have genes, they do not have a cellular structure, which is often seen as the basic unit of life. Viruses do not have their own metabolism, and require a host cell to make new products. They therefore cannot naturally reproduce outside a host cell – although bacterial species such as rickettsia and chlamydia are considered living organisms despite the same limitation. Accepted forms of life use cell division to reproduce, whereas viruses spontaneously assemble within cells. They differ from autonomous growth of crystals as they inherit genetic mutations while being subject to natural selection.
Is life on earth everything that processes sunlight, directly or indirectly? Well solar panels do and microbes subsisting on energy released from deep sea vents don't. Is sexual reproduction the defining characteristic of life? Plenty of examples to the contrary of life forms reproducing in other ways.
It's actually really hard to find a precise definition that doesn't have an exception.
As for the Spielgelman's Monster, if this were to be described as living, that would mean man had created "life" from non-living matter, that would be rather big news.
But it also doesn't do much. That's a nebulous, hard to pin down statement. But I mean it doesn't have all the complex machinery and behaviors of living cells. It's static and kind of just floats around. Until things happen to bump into it and stick.
It's not fundamentally different than a virus. Which are also self replicating, but I don't think they are considered "living".