Ever since bjork's "biophilia" album I have considered it a gradient between crystals and biology: they both use atoms in their surrounding to create copies of

Ever since bjork's "biophilia" album I have considered it a gradient between crystals and biology: they both use atoms in their surrounding to create copies of their structure. Stone does so in a temperature gradient in the environment (atoms crystallizing as they precipitate out of solution) while Life is able to store enough energy in itself to impose structure (trading energy for entropy) on surrounding atoms even when the environment would otherwise dissolve it. The threshold for 'life' is replicating even when conditions are not perfect, that's survival. (on another note, we would never have discovered DNA if not for the same x-ray techniques being used to analyze the symmetries of stone)