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Crystallography requires the collection of many measurements (could be a few thousand to even millions depending on the size of the molecule and complexity of the crystal (technically speaking, the size of the crystal's unit cell is a major determining factor for the size of the data set). I'm not going to assume this is a small molecule crystal like a salt ...

As you point out, there isn't a singularly accepted biological defnition of 'hybrid.' The most basic would be a single organism that exhibits traits of two individual organisms, but that will find perfectly acceptable disagreement depending on who you talk to. You, for instance, are human - but a hybrid of your parents' genomes. So I would personally say ...

I think the definition in Wikipedia is simply bad because it depends on another debatable definition. I prefer something which follows from an observation made by Ricard Dawkins in The Extended Phenotype (the following is my definition, but I think Dawkins had something similar in mind): An organism is any system of components which depend on each other ...

One important difference is that spontaneous generation is a form of "mechanism" by which a certain species is "born", so it is repeated many times. For such complex organisms this would be part of their "life cycle". It would also need to be a regulated, robust process. Abiogenesis, on the other hand, would create an organism which from that point on does ...