[Alamo-Girl]

Oops, I pressed post too soon. It should have said:

A spore is not dead, it is in a vegetative or dormant form which still has information and can communicate with its environment when it permits, e.g. once it has a food source.

[Doctor Stochastic]

The boundaries between life and non-life are inherently fuzzy. It's easy to claim that a chipmunk is living and a rock is non-living. (It's just as easy to claim the converse, but not so accurate.) It's not so easy to tell with viruses. Viruses do mutate and are themselves amenable to evolutionary descriptions. (The feline leukemia virus recently, maybe about 1972, underwent a favorable mutation which allowed it to infect dogs.) Prions are another matter; it's not clear whether one wants to call them living. Non-living matter can have biological effects.