@OnNegation Cool, but I am not sure why the features he lists are not mechanisms? Also, the cell is not entirely bounded, it is actually quite permeable, and more modular than self-maintaining (whatever is meant by "self" there). These ideas of life as self-organizing dynamics (like autopoiesis) have been around for quite a while, but they have a hard time coming up with operationalizable ideas and experimental pipelines---e.g. defining what is exactly the self-preserving unit.