Eli5: What differentiates animals from other living things?
In: Biology
Strictly speaking, a term like ‘animal’ or ‘plant’ really means it belongs to a particular branch of the tree of life. Animals are all the organisms that descend from one particular common ancestor.
They have features in common, like they are multicellular, have cells without cell walls and complex nuclei, they tend to move around actively. All these things are inherited and shared from their common ancestor. But the thing that makes an ‘animal’ an ‘animal’ scientifically, is its descent. An organism would still be an animal even if it lost some of the typical animal-y features through evolution.
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