its general properties, at least over some period of time”.

But again there are exceptions

and the most known example are flames that also have a well-known capacity for
growth.

Biochemical: “A biochemical or molecular biological definition sees living organisms

as systems that contain reproducible hereditary information coded in nucleic acid
molecules and that metabolize by controlling the rate of chemical reactions using
proteinaceous catalysts known as enzymes.”

Genetic: life is “a system capable of evolution by natural selection”. This definition

places great emphasis on the importance of replication. But again, some organisms,
many hybrids for example, do not replicate at all, but their individual cells do. It is also
true that life defined in this way does not exclude synthetic duplication.

Thermodynamic: “living systems might then be defined as localized regions where

there is a continuous increase in order”. It would be better to clarify that these living
systems increase their order but at the expense of a larger decrease in order of the
universe outside.

Ewin Schrodinger’s “What is Life?”

There have been other attempts of defining life as the one by the physicist Erwin
Schrödinger in 1945. Schrödinger proposes to “develop first what you might call a
naive physicist's ideas about organisms” and he generally defined life as that which
resists decaying to disorder and equilibrium. He believed the heredity material (the
chromosome fiber) to be a molecule, which unlike a crystal does not repeat itself,
calling it an aperiodic crystal. For him, the aperiodic nature of that molecule allowed it
to encode an almost infinite number of possibilities with a small number of atoms, thus
being the material carrier of life. He also compared a clockwork with an organism
saying that “the latter hinges upon a solid –the aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary
substance, largely withdrawn from the disorder of heat motion” (Schrödinger, E. 1945).