And those offspring pass it on too, and if you don't have that, if you have inaccurate genetic inheritance, you get tall giraffes and you also get shorter-affes, the original shorter-affes,

because the tall

giraffe may not be able to pass on that trait to its offspring.

And that means no evolution. So let's get back to this idea of accurate replication in a little more

detail. And if you think about it, accurate self-replication is a property solely of life. In fact, it's a property solely of living cells. Nothing in the non-biological world is capable of self-replication. That sounds extreme, but let's take a look. Let's say you see a house that you really like and you want to build a replica of it, because you want the same house. You could do that. You could hire a contractor,

a few contractors, and you could replicate everything about the house, the walls, the ceilings,

the electrical system, the plumbing system. And let's say you like the house so much that you even like what's inside it, the furniture, the books, the paintings, everything that's in the house. So you want to get a complete, accurate replica of every part of this house. Again, it's possible to do that. But one thing you can never do

is find a house that will replicate itself. Okay, now people talk about self-replicating factories, they talk about self-replicating robots, so far we don't have

them. They may be theoretically possible, but

they may also may not

be.