"Let’s instead define life very broadly, simply as a process that can retain its complexity and replicate. What’s replicated isn’t matter but information specifying how the atoms are arranged. When a bacterium makes a copy of its DNA, no new atoms are created, but a new set of atoms are arranged in the same pattern as the original, thereby copying the information. In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware."
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