>>14019912I would agree with your absurdum that they are not living, but they ARE for a certain and extremely superseding reason which you as a biologist (even a midwit) should be well familiar with: the cladistic principle.Those organisms descend from very clearly fully autonomously replicating systems. They were animals that got lazy, in essence. That is not enough to have them lose their status as living.
However, if there via some magical means there were a planet full of such dependent "organisms" that somehow evolved from nothing but pure rock, with no independent replicators, there's a good argument they could be classified as not "living" to us (pragmatically, we would coin a new verb/concept for such a third variant).
I would also call self-repliating nanobots not living. Now the ball is back in your court: are such dependent replicators without complex animal ancestors automatically living?
