EMBEDDED ASSESSMENT
Summarize this list of the Characteristics of Life. Ask students to gather other sources from their textbook. Point out how long the list is and that there is no single characteristic that is both necessary and sufficient, all of them are. Note that I did not address: What is Life? But rather discussed the Characteristics of Life. What Life is, is a process of increasing organization, a tesseract (ref Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time) that inevitably fails. Explaining that one without the Second Law is impossible. The Second Law is too hard. I used to try to teach it (smashing plates and smooshing cockroaches) and gave up. Are there other tesseracts?