You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

DavidPlumpton comments on What is life? - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: Douglas_Reay 01 April 2012 09:12PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (44)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: DavidPlumpton 03 April 2012 09:52:45AM 0 points [-]

It seems to me that both a genotype and phenotype is needed to qualify for labelling something as alive. It's difficult to see how any form of natural selection could operate on inheritance and variation without a genotype. So that would rule out crystals and so forth.