Death

Main article: Death

Animal corpses, like this African buffalo, are recycled by

the ecosystem, providing energy and nutrients for living organisms.
Death is the termination of all vital functions or life processes in an organism or cell. [30]
[31]
One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. Death would
seem to refer to either the moment life ends, or when the state that follows life begins.
[31]
However, determining when death has occurred is difficult, as cessation of life
functions is often not simultaneous across organ systems.[32] Such determination,
therefore, requires drawing conceptual lines between life and death. This is problematic
because there is little consensus over how to define life. The nature of death has for
millennia been a central concern of the world's religious traditions and of philosophical
inquiry. Many religions maintain faith in either a kind of afterlife or reincarnation for
the soul, or resurrection of the body at a later date.[33]

Viruses
Main article: Virus

Adenoviruses as seen under an electron microscope

Whether or not viruses should be considered as alive is controversial.[34][35] They are most
often considered as just gene coding replicators rather than forms of life.[36] They have
been described as "organisms at the edge of life"[37] because they possess genes,
evolve by natural selection,[38][39] and replicate by making multiple copies of themselves
through self-assembly. However, viruses do not metabolise and they require a host cell
to make new products. Virus self-assembly within host cells has implications for the
study of the origin of life, as it may support the hypothesis that life could have started as
self-assembling organic molecules.[40][41]

History of study
Materialism
Main article: Materialism
Some of the earliest theories of life were materialist, holding that all that exists is matter,
and that life is merely a complex form or arrangement of matter. Empedocles (430 BC)
argued that everything in the universe is made up of a combination of four eternal
"elements" or "roots of all": earth, water, air, and fire. All change is explained by the
arrangement and rearrangement of these four elements. The various forms of life are
caused by an appropriate mixture of elements.[42] Democritus (460 BC) was an atomist;
he thought that the essential characteristic of life was having a soul (psyche), and that
the soul, like everything else, was composed of fiery atoms. He elaborated on fire
because of the apparent connection between life and heat, and because fire moves.
[43]
Plato, in contrast, held that the world was organized by permanent forms, reflected
imperfectly in matter; forms provided direction or intelligence, explaining the regularities
observed in the world.[44] The mechanistic materialism that originated in ancient
Greece was revived and revised by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–
1650), who held that animals and humans were assemblages of parts that together
functioned as a machine. This idea was developed further by Julien Offray de La
Mettrie (1709–1750) in his book L'Homme Machine.[45] In the 19th century the advances
in cell theory in biological science encouraged this view. The evolutionary theory
of Charles Darwin (1859) is a mechanistic explanation for the origin of species by
means of natural selection.[46] At the beginning of the 20th century Stéphane
Leduc (1853–1939) promoted the idea that biological processes could be understood in
terms of physics and chemistry, and that their growth resembled that of inorganic
crystals immersed in solutions of sodium silicate. His ideas, set out in his book La
biologie synthétique[47] was widely dismissed during his lifetime, but has incurred a
resurgence of interest in the work of Russell, Barge and colleagues.[48]