Modern biology does not try to define life by some characteristic physical attribute or substance – some living ‘essence’ – with which only animate matter is endowed. We no longer expect there to be any such essence, because we now know that ‘animate matter’, matter in the form of living organisms, is not the basis of life. It is merely one of the effects of life, and the basis of life is molecular. It is the fact that there exist molecules which cause certain environments to make copies of those molecules.
