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Comment by mfav | Hacker News Reader

The monster itself is just a strand of RNA.

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.

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Fire and viruses have an important difference though, when fire replicates, its children don't inherit anything. A better example would be crystals as their structure influences crystals they seed.

Neither fire nor crystals mutate. That's the thing.

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

Crystals actually do mutate, the crystallization process is not perfect and introduces defects.

that's not what mutation means.

I thought mutate just meant change?

in biology, mutate has a very specific meaning, and it does not include the formation of imperfect crystals. That area has its own set of terminology.

the operational definition agreed on in mainstream science is that to be living, you have to do regulated metabolism. This definition mainly exists to distinguish viruses from cells; I'm sure there are even cells which don't metabolize, but those are exceptional cases in which the ability to metabolize was lost in a parasitic situation.

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.

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