Profound Sayings That Are Junk

Are viruses alive? That's the question I asked Google and while most sources  said "no they're not," there was at least one that said "yes they are." Since the general consensus (at present) is that viruses are non-living we should not call their transformation from one strain to another as evolution but rather something else, maybe development. Virology should be a subset of chemistry, not biology. Since mutation is reserved for living entities another word or term should be used for viruses. 

I think it was Damon Knight who wrote a tale about a time-scope by which people could precisely view what was happening at any time in our planet's past. Using this device would it be possible to definitively say that we have identified the exact moment in time that the first living entity appeared on earth? 

The answer is that we couldn't do it even with a sci-fi time-scope. Instead, we would come across some period when non-biological entities possessed some, but not all, the attributes of life. If we were required to pick the time life began down to the hour I'd pick one moment, you'd pick another, others would make different choices. 

My point is that it's all arbitrary and we can't say that non-living things persist while other things live. Some molecular formations crowded out others in the pre-life era and the same thing happens today. It's the same thing.