What is life?

[Robert Brooksbank]

Jay Mone' wrote:
> 
> With my General Biology students, I characterize a living organism as
> one which can extract energy from the environment and use that energy
> in a way beneficial to the organism.  Put another way, living
> organisms metabolize.  This definition excludes viruses, which on
> their own are metabolically inert, depending entirely on redirecting
> host cell metabolism.  This also excludes other "organisms like
> computer viruses, which in many ways are identical to their biological
> counterparts.
> 
> What do you think?
> 

Couldn't you equally be describing a fire?

Rob