>>12203050>The idea of multicellular life is arbitraryImportant to note for most people who wander into bio/cell bio 101 and start asking stupid questions like "are viruses alive?" and "is X a different species?"
It's all arbitrary and we just lasso a box that most things fit in to make it easier to tell them apart. At a certain point it all blends together; if you look at a gradient from red to purple, you can box in the extreme right/left as obviously red and purple, but its pretty useless to try and philosophize about at which color is the boundary so that left is red/right is purple of whatever.
Ring species make it abundantly clear that a solid definition of "species" can't exist, and defining life with a set of rules means something will eventually challenge those sets of rules and the change from biochemical reactions to life is a gradient.
