Which is either a mistake... or a lie.
It's neither.
As for the rest, you can pretend that YOUR version is the case because your proclaim it true, but of course anyone else can that's all it is. A proclamation by Tim Fowler. yawn.
And we are supposed to pay more attention to a proclamation by LLCF?
Also your proclamation is obviously false.
The rest -
"In fact its a false definition without that addition. Since it isn't true that all organisms are capable of all of those things. Arguably all species of organisms have members that are capable of those things, but not all individual organisms. Reproduction is the most obvious (but not only) example. Not only are many individual organisms not yet capable of reproduction, or not capable of reproduction any more, some never, at any point of their life, are capable of reproduction."
- is completely true. If we where to apply your definition unmodified than sterile life forms, or immature life forms that can not yet reproduce would not be life.
The definition you provided (apparently from Wikipedia) therefore doesn't fit with the normal meaning of the word life.
If you do modify it to add "at some point during the life of the organism" or words to that effect rather than implying that in order to be an organism it had to be able to reproduce and do all the other things at every point, then you would be closer to a reasonable definition, but still not quite there since there are organisms that can not reproduce at any stage in their life, and they don't cease to be organisms.
If you change it to say that members of the species have to do all of those things, even if not every member has to, then you would have a pretty good definition. But even that breaks down in extreme cases. For example if you have very few members of the species left, and they are all incapable of reproduction, or one of the other actions, you would still have a group of organisms, even though not a single member of the species could reproduce, grow, or whatever other characteristic they are missing. If that's a permanent situation the species would soon die out, but even then before they died they would still be "separate organisms", and even after they died they would be "dead organisms", not parts of the the previous organisms they sprang from. |
