<<Life>> is a collective term for the characteristic attribute of living creatures from a bacterium to plants and animals.

Everything that propagates itself by insemination and the division of cells can be called a living creature.

It is the organised collaboration of complex structures which discerns biological processes of reproduction and development from physical processes like condensation or crystallisation:

Growth

Metabolism

Heredity

Evolution

One of the most important elements of life is insemination. By duplication of the hereditary substance and the following division of cells a new and independent individual comes into being.

A further sign of life is individualisation. Every organism is an individual. The cell is the smallest unit able to live on its own and to reproduce itself. Viruses are not living creatures, as they are not able to reproduce themselves. They can only survive as spongers on a complex host organism.

One of the further signs of life is susceptibility of living creatures. Information from the world around us is provided to organisms by receivers and sense organs, and these organisms can react to these susceptibilities from the world around us. Such reactions can be a movement in the form of a change of location. Movement (even only on the cellular level) is also a sign of life.