Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25266931-20141008232543/@comment-24891101-20141015050153

My own theory tends toward spontaneously appearing either near negative emotion or in the deep wilderness, where no souls shine to burn them away. Only in darkness do they appear, and are drawn like moths to flame to man and his tribulations.

I wouldn't call them alive in any conventional sense. I doubt they meet the five criteria. Since all animals have Aura, if they are alive, then MRCA was before animals split off of bacteria. And since neural complexity is likely either correlated or causative to the soul, then their intelligence is utterly alien.