A powerful and concise concept of life is crucial for studies aiming to understand the characteristics that emerged from an inorganic world. Among biologists, the most accepted argument define life under a top-down strategy by looking into the shared characteristics observed in all cellular organisms. This is often made highlighting (i) autonomy and (ii) evolutionary capacity as fundamental characteristics observed in all cellular organisms. Along the present work, we assume the framework of code biology considering that biology started with the emergence of the first organic code by self-organization. We reinforces that the conceptual structure of life should be reallocated from the ontology class of Matter to its sister class of Process. Along the emergence and early evolution of biological systems, biological codes changed from open systems of “naked” molecules (at the progenote era), to close, encapsulated systems (at the organismic era). Living beings appeared at the very moment when nucleic acids with coding properties became encapsulated. This led to the origin of viruses and, then, to the origin of cells. In this context, we propose that the single character that makes a clear distinction between the abiotic and the biotic world is the capacity to process organic codes. Thus, life appears with the self-assembly of a genetic code and evolves by the emergence of other overlapping codes. Once life has been clearly conceptualized, we go further to conceptualize organisms, parents, lineages, and species in terms of code biology.

强大而简洁的生命概念对于旨在了解无机世界中出现的特征的研究至关重要。在生物学家中，最被接受的论点是通过研究在所有细胞生物中观察到的共同特征，在自上而下的策略下定义生命。这通常强调 (i) 自主性和 (ii) 进化能力作为在所有细胞生物中观察到的基本特征。在目前的工作中，我们假设代码生物学的框架，考虑到生物学始于自组织的第一个有机代码的出现。我们强调生命的概念结构应该从物质的本体类重新分配到它的姐妹类过程。随着生物系统的出现和早期进化，生物密码从“裸”分子的开放系统（在后代时代）转变为封闭的、封装的系统（在有机体时代）。生物出现在具有编码特性的核酸被封装的那一刻。这导致了病毒的起源，然后导致了细胞的起源。在这种情况下，我们建议明确区分非生物世界和生物世界的单一特征是处理有机代码的能力。因此，生命随着遗传密码的自组装而出现，并随着其他重叠密码的出现而进化。一旦生命被清楚地概念化，我们就进一步从密码生物学的角度对生物体、父母、谱系和物种进行概念化。