what is a characteristic that is not required for the life of an individual organism to continue?
107001
A subsciption to "Penthouse".\nA pet armadillo.\nAn apartment with views overlooking a nuclear waste treatment facility.\n\nThere are an  infinite number of possible answers like that. All perfectly correct. Organsims can continue to live without any of those charcteristics, and most do live without them.\n\nYou haven't given us enough information to answer the question.
831468
An existing organism is born with certain genes.  Those genes determine how that organism will develop during its life.  Those genes cannot change ... there is no mechanism in life to alter the genes for the entire organism (individual cells yes ... e.g. cancer, but not the entire organism).\n\nSo even if that single organism lived for centuries (like a redwood tree), it cannot change (evolve) in ways not dictated by its genes.\n\nNew life (offspring) is a brand new set of genes ... a new mixture from each of its parents.  \n\nSo each offspring can be different from either one of its parents ... better or worse in some characteristics, or all characteristics, from either parent.\n\nSo over the entire group of individuals in a species ... you have many individuals with slight improvements over their parents.  Those will produce more offspring than those who have fewer improvements (or are slightly worse adapted) than their parents.\n\nThe result is evolution.  Many many tiny improvements in genes, over many many generations.  You cannot have that evolution, without the opportunity for new genes with every new life.
376444
This is a more complex question than it seems. In order to fully define Death we would have to fully define Life, and that has not been done yet. Life can be described, and there is the Cell Theory of Life, but what 'life' is, no one can say yet.\nHowever, it is plain that everything living moves somehow, and that it reproduces somehow, and that whatever is living must use and excrete whatever substances it needs in order to keep on living. In most cases we are talking here about nutrition and respiration, respiration being the more critical. When respiration ceases either on a cellular level or throughout the entire organism, everything shuts down, because chemical reactions in the cells and between them can no longer take place. Some bacteria will go into a spore stage when this happens, and can thus survive extremes of temperatures and dehydration (like anthrax and TB). Generally in the absence of oxygen, cells lose their ph balance and become acidic, which upsets all chemical reactions in the cell. Conversely, anaerobic bacteria like botulism, when exposed to oxygen, go through a similar process of having all chemical reactions messed up.\nTherefore, although we cannot say what exactly 'death' is, we recognize it in animals by: an absence of respiration, an absence of pulse, an absence of reflexes (due to brain and nerve death), an absence of sensation, an absence of conciousness, and an inability to eat or reproduce. It is further noted by an absence of brain wave activity.\nIn plants death is noted by an inability to rehydrate, lack of response to stimuli, inability to reproduce or respire, and limpness.\nIn microbes, death is noted by an absence of cell division or reproduction, or by bursting of the cell walls.
541814
DNA is a molecule, not a living object. It can stay there as long as it is not disturbed and swept away.
823692
Have a look here:\nhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/features/287feature2.shtml\n\nAnd here:\nhttp://users.aber.ac.uk/sac5/characteristics.htm
766661
do you mean what processes cells must undergo? \n\nIf that's your question, then the processes would be cell division by mitosis (to produce more cells, so that organism can increase in size/length), cell elongation(this occurs mainly in plants via vacuolation and thus aids in increase in size and length) and cell differentiation(this allows genes to be switched on or off so that certain traits/phenotypes can be expressed, eg. gene that codes for blue eyes switched on for cell in the eye and not elsewhere like cell on the hand/feet). Hope this answers your question.
633573
an essential and distinguishing attribute of something or someone
843146
Phenotype\nThe phenotype of an individual organism is either its total physical appearance and constitution or a specific manifestation of a trait, such as size, eye color, or behavior that varies between individuals. Phenotype is determined to some extent by genotype, or by the identity of the alleles that an individual carries at one or more positions on the chromosomes. Many phenotypes are determined by multiple genes and influenced by environmental factors. Thus, the identity of one or a few known alleles does not always enable prediction of the phenotype.\n\nNevertheless, because phenotypes are much easier to observe than genotypes (it doesn't take chemistry or sequencing to determine a person's eye color), classical genetics uses phenotypes to deduce the functions of genes. Breeding experiments can then check these inferences. In this way, early geneticists were able to trace inheritance patterns without any knowledge of molecular biology.\n\nPhenotypic variation (due to underlying heritable genetic variation) is a fundamental prerequisite for evolution by natural selection. The fitness of an organism is a high-level phenotype determined by the contributions of thousands of more specific phenotypes. Without phenotypic variation, individual organisms would all have the same fitness, and changes in phenotypic frequency would proceed without any selection (randomly).\n\nThe interaction between genotype and phenotype has often been conceptualized by the following relationship:\n\ngenotype + environment → phenotype \n\nA slightly more nuanced version of the relationships is:\n\ngenotype + environment + random-variation → phenotype \n\nAn example of the importance of random variation in phenotypic expression is Drosophila flies in which number of eyes may vary (randomly) between left and right sides in a single individual as much as they do between different genotypes overall, or between clones raised in different environments.\n\nA phenotype is any detectable characteristic of an organism (i.e., structural, biochemical, physiological and behavioral) determined by an interaction between its genotype and environment (see genotype-phenotype distinction and phenotypic plasticity for a further elaboration of this distinction).\n\nAccording to the autopoietic notion of living systems by Humberto Maturana, the phenotype is epigenetically being constructed throughout ontogeny, and we as observers do the distinctions that define any particular trait at any particular state of the organism's life cycle.\n\nThe idea of the phenotype has been generalized by Richard Dawkins (in The Extended Phenotype) to mean all the effects a gene has on the outside world which may influence its chances of being replicated. These can be effects on the organism in which the gene resides, the environment or other organisms.\n\nand\n\nGenotype\nThe genotype is the specific genetic makeup (the specific genome) of an individual, in the form of DNA. Together with the environmental variation that influences the individual, it codes for the phenotype of that individual. Non-hereditary mutations are not classically understood as representing the individuals' genotype. Hence, scientists and doctors sometimes talk for example about the (geno)type of a particular cancer, thus separating the disease from the diseased. While codons for different amino acids may change in a random mutation (changing the sequence coding a gene), this doesn't necessarily alter the phenotype.\n\nTypically, one refers to an individual's genotype with regard to a particular gene of interest and, in polyploid individuals, it refers to what combination of alleles the individual carries (see homozygous, heterozygous). Any given gene will usually cause an observable change in an organism, known as the phenotype. The terms genotype and phenotype are distinct for at least two reasons:\n\n1. To distinguish the source of an observer's knowledge (one can know about ge
139079
to avoid a disease or other medical condition.
1024670
I'd suggest you look in the front of your textbook.  It will be along the lines of "The principles of biology are. . . ."  Usually when they ask open ended questions like these they don't want a thoughtful and insightful answer like the ones given above but rather, for you to parrot the aforementioned sentence back to them.
1082779
Characteristics of living Organisms\n\n1.Organization - Living things are composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life. \n\n2.Metabolic Processes - Metabolism produces energy by converting nonliving material into cellular components (synthesis) and decomposing organic matter (catalysis). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life. \n\n3.Growth - Growth results from a higher rate of synthesis than catalysis. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter. \n\n4.Adaptation - Adaptation is the accommodation of a living organism to its environment. It is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of matabolized substances, and external factors present. \n\n5.Responds to stimuli - A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism when touched to complex reactions involving all the senses of higher animals. A response is often expressed by motion: the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun or an animal chasing its prey. \n\n6.Reproducing - The division of one cell to form two new cells is reproduction. Usually the term is applied to the production of a new individual (either asexually, from a single parent organism, or sexually, from two differing parent organisms), although strictly speaking it also describes the production of new cells in the process of growth.
73051
All sorts of factors affect the suitability of the human body fluids to sustain life; these include properties like temperature, salinity, and acidity, and the concentrations of nutrients such as glucose, various ions, oxygen, and wastes, such as carbon dioxide and urea. Since these properties affect the chemical reactions that keep bodies alive, there are built-in physiological mechanisms to maintain them at desirable levels.\n\nHowever, it should be noted that homeostasis is not the reason for these ongoing unconscious adjustments. Homeostasis should be thought of as a general characterization of many normal processes in concert, not their proximal cause per se. Moreover, there are numerous biological phenomena which do not conform to this model, such as anabolism.
779752
A living cell (like a cell from the liver, lungs, brain, etc...) will die soon after it was removed from its original "place" (liver, lungs, brain, etc.) as it has no more nutrients-supply (by blood venes, for example!) except it is kept in an artificial environment, a culture medium, which is suited to it's very specific needs.\n\nA living cell that is an organism needs a special suited environment, too (a diatom won't survive in the desert...). But it is not depending on an EXTERNAL supply of nutrients, as it "searches" its nutrients on its own. Bacteria, for example, don't need blood venes to grow in order to make cell division, they just need an environment which supplies all the needed nutrients. That's why bacteria can grow nearly everywhere, while lung cells  would die short after you dispersed them on an old dank sponge.\n\nHope I helped you. Excuse my English, please, it's not my first language. Good luck for tomorrow! ;-)
712277
one of the characteristics of living things is respiration, which is the breakdown of glucose to release energy, so the same thing applies for plants...because plants do respire!!! They need energy for other physiological processes like photosynthesis or growth or reproduction etc..
786278
Species have NOT evolved to die.  The more accurate phrasing is that they have not evolved to live indefinately.  After reproduction, and the passing on of genetic material, Selection can no longer exert any pressure on a population.  This means that a species cannot evolve a longer life span unless there is some environmental pressure which causes reproduction to occur later, thereby selecting those individuals who can both survive, and remain fertile until such a time.  Actually, since reproduction is the defining event, some think that populations may actually enrich with genes which cause enhanced function in early life, but are detrimental later, eg. increased calcium deposition in bones.  Its called antagonistic pleiotropy.  \n\nRecent research on yeast has found genes which are regulated by metabolism, and can sense a dearth of nutrition.  When they do, they cause changes which allow the yeast to extend both their life and fertility until conditions improve.  So you can see that there are some ways in which selection can yield a longer life span.
177690
An organism will have offspring, each will be different. The offspring with the "differences" that give it the best chance of survival, will tend to live, and pass those traits on to there offspring. That's it, that's all evolution is.
454209
It is the organic processes (in a cell or organism) that are necessary for life.