[Revised entry by William Bechtel and Andrew Bollhagen on January 6, 2026.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Among biological entities, cells are regarded as of special importance since they are widely viewed as the simplest organized systems that are unambiguously alive. Although one can debate about entities such as viruses, there is little debate that cells are living. Cells perform all the activities critical to life, from metabolism to reproduction. All cells alive today maintain themselves far from thermodynamic equilibrium with their environment and are the product of a continuous lineage of cell division that goes back approximately…

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