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Circle of life isn't going far enough, though (and is usually used as a mystical device anyway). If you want to go to the furthest defensible extreme[0], then all of life is just one long, violent, ever-expanding chemical chain reaction, that started some 4+ billion years ago, and shows no sign of stopping[1]. What we call life - cells and plants and fungi, bacteria and cows and people - are just stable-ish substructures you could identify within the fractal complexity of that chemical fire, that completely enveloped the surface of this planet, cracked it and reached deep underneath, and recently even started spitting bits of itself to the Moon, Mars, and even beyond the Solar System. This framing isn't particularly useful to us most of the time, but I find that occasionally invoking it helps really understand that there is no such thing as "an individual" or "a specific object" in the physical universe, no true boundary separating this fox from that squirrel, or this person from another. It's how we perceive the world because the approximation holds up at our time scales, but on occasion (such as when discussing nano-scale things, or evolutionary biology), it's worth remembering it's not true. Nature doesn't have boundaries. -- [0] - Going further makes things too generalized to be useful. Like, yes, we're all made from star stuff. [1] - Think of it like of the "Game of Life" or such simulations, where most states quickly decay to nothing or some static form, but every now and then you'll find a configuration that just explodes and keeps going, expanding its borders and perhaps leaving behind some further explosions on a fuse, recursively. Life is like that. |