[akulesa]

Totally agreed - I might steal your last paragraph there!

Chemistry is "the details" of biology, but it tells us next to nothing about what we actually care about, probably what you called "self-organizing information propagation" .

I think good definition for life shouldn't include any dependence on the chemistry used to manifest it. Agreed?

[dnautics]

yeah, it is just a broad stroke characterization of the feels of each field. Some types of particle physicists would be probably be reclassified as chemists under my scheme, which they would bristle at, although in all honesty they are inheritors of a long line of tradition that goes through the indisputably chemist lavoisier, berzelius, and curie - more than they are newton or maxwell, planck, or einstein.