I’ve talked about my cats before and sadly we had to have our 17-year old cat euthanized. Our 18-year old Tom is the only animal that we’ve ever had that has even come close to living 17 years, so you can say she had a good long life, but still, it was sad.
As I was taking Scotch’s body out to the river for burial, I got to thinking about life itself. What is life? One definition is that life is anything that self-perpetuates and has DNA or RNA.
What do we mean by “self-perpetuates”? That means you maintain the living condition and you reproduce. The living condition is a continuous series of complicated, interacting chemical reactions that maintain themselves and are able to adapt and change over time.
Reproduction is necessary because you can’t “create” life, you can only continue it. That …