Life begins with a few elemental pressures. Complexity should emerge through repeated lives, deaths and inherited experience rather than through hand-authored intelligence.
Organisation
Life has structure, identity and relationships between its parts.
Metabolism
Energy must be found, transformed and spent to continue living.
Homeostasis
Organisms must preserve internal stability in a changing world.
Growth and development
Survival and nourishment create maturity, ageing and eventual decline.
Reproduction
Life passes imperfect physical and learned inheritance into a new generation.
Response to stimuli
Food, danger and other organisms make adaptation necessary.
Adaptation through evolution
Useful behaviour should persist because it survives, not because it was prescribed.