Equating science with faith

So... how do I tell the difference between "dead" chemicals and "alive" chemicals?

So... how do I tell? What's the diffence between a "living" chemical, and a "dead" chemical? What can I see under the microscope that will let me tell the difference? What properties are different?

We find multi-cellular life in the fossil record at least 100 million years before the Cambrian (see the "Ediacaran Fauna), while Bangiomorpha pubescens (see [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_algae]"red algae") appears 1.2 billion years ago, 600 million years further into the past. That's 700 million years between the first known multi-cellular life and the "Cambrian Explosion". You claim here is manifestly false.500 million years is a staggeringly long time for any trace of anything to survive. And even then you're talking about searching rocks for traces of things invisible to the human eye in order to eek out what traces we can of the first stirrings of multi-cellular life. The paucity of the early fossil record is not an excuse, it's a fact."red algae") appears 1.2 billion years ago, 600 million years further into the past. That's 700 million years between the first known multi-cellular life and the "Cambrian Explosion". You claim here is manifestly false.500 million years is a staggeringly long time for any trace of anything to survive. And even then you're talking about searching rocks for traces of things invisible to the human eye in order to eek out what traces we can of the first stirrings of multi-cellular life. The paucity of the early fossil record is not an excuse, it's a fact.[]"red algae") appears 1.2 billion years ago, 600 million years further into the past. That's 700 million years between the first known multi-cellular life and the "Cambrian Explosion". You claim here is manifestly false.500 million years is a staggeringly long time for any trace of anything to survive. And even then you're talking about searching rocks for traces of things invisible to the human eye in order to eek out what traces we can of the first stirrings of multi-cellular life. The paucity of the early fossil record is not an excuse, it's a fact."red algae") appears 1.2 billion years ago, 600 million years further into the past. That's 700 million years between the first known multi-cellular life and the "Cambrian Explosion". You claim here is manifestly false.500 million years is a staggeringly long time for any trace of anything to survive. And even then you're talking about searching rocks for traces of things invisible to the human eye in order to eek out what traces we can of the first stirrings of multi-cellular life. The paucity of the early fossil record is not an excuse, it's a fact.

It is still chemicals. I hate to keep banging on at this point, but it's important to grasp: there's no magical living/dead divide. That's because we like to stick to this akward thing called "the facts". It makes it all terribly inconvenient for us.