Virus are a proto-lifeform, same as the creators of computer virus.
Oh, they can spend long periods of time being inert, and then resume activity when conditions change to be more favorable?
… Like a tardigrade? Or a seed?
Oh, they cannot reproduce themselves on their own or within their own species?
… Like a obligate parasite wasp? Or a plant species that relies on a pollinator?
Oh, they do not reach a stable equilibrium within their ecosystem?
… Like humans?
I’ll give you that viruses never metabolize and are not capable of homeostasis… but they do not lack ‘any’ of the characteristics of life, they have some big ones.
They reproduce, evolve, and respond to stimuli.
Prions are just fucking terrifying
Mr. Smith’s humanity is a virus speech intensifies
(Yes I know this is a different scene, but its funnier, and Smith’s character arc is that he is a virus.)
Agent Smith never heard of Australia.
But has he heard of Isildur and his bane?
Bane… Brisbane?
Not only do they evolve, they evolve more rapidly than any other creatures we’re aware of. A virus can mutate almost immediately, whereas other animals require millions of years to display those sorts of dramatic changes.
Complex organisms can also drastically change from point mutations, although such changes are more likely to kill the organism as they grow more complex. Viruses are so incredibly simple and make so many copies that this doesn’t matter.
Many organisms can hybridize, which can make drastic changes with much less chance of fatal errors. Plants especially like this; see farmed maize vs wild maize or the entire brassica genus.
Viruses also hybridize though, and can do so much more drastically. Most of the critical genes are in the host, so virus genomes are free to do whatever, and because they highjack other genomes a very small change can radically alter their behavior.
This virus on it’s own is absolutely useless and can’t adjust to it’s environment at all. A parasitic wasp is still a seperate entity that has it’s own cells and genetic material that covers all basic function of a living thing. A virus is literally just a protein coat protecting a bit of genetic material. A parasitic organism is still doing cellular metabolism even if it isn’t in a host organism, but a virus isn’t.
Of course it adjusts to its environment – it even uses it to replicate. Viruses are that branch of the genome which is being minimalist about its seed pods, other branches need all kinds of superfluous stuff like eyes and limbs and brains and whatnot. Complete waste of resources, having pods which can maintain independent homeostasis, what good does that for the homeostasis of the genome? Eh?
Viruses make the simplest prokaryotes look complicated. A bacteria has ribosomes to read nucleic acids to make proteins and enzymes. That’s the cellular metabolism that a virus actually lacks. It’s not a matter of calling a person a living thing while their cheek cells aren’t. You can take human tissue sampes and culture them indefinitely if you wanted to, because those cells are still undergoing cellular metabolism, taking in resources and excreting waste products. A virus doesn’t even have the ability to read it’s own genetic material. It’s a hostile instruction manual.
It’s a hostile instruction manual which learns, adapting itself to its surroundings, constantly re-writing and re-inventing how it interacts with the world. Which is more than can be said about most politicians. Forget about physical anatomy, for a second, and consider the species as an organism.
It’s not, and i am not going to keep arguing in circles with people who want to contradict basic and agreed upon biology.
I’m not contradicting anything, I didn’t even use the word “life”. I’m simply taking the perspective of the genome, and fighting against the notion that viruses would act as mechanistically as prions.
And yet, that wasp will die out in a single generation if it’s host disappears. It does most of it’s own processing, but it’s existence is still contingent on a specific host species. Does that make parasites less alive than other life?
Many insects go through a phase of their lives without a mouth or stomach. They can’t eat at all and quickly starve. Are they less alive?
Most life would die out if the sun stopped shining. Does that make chemotrophic organisms more alive than phototrophic life?
Chemotrophic life still needs chemicals to eat, and are completely useless without them. Does that make a Boltzmann Brain the most alive thing possible, coming into existence without any outside action whatsoever?
Plants depend on the sun for energy, animals depend on plants for carbohydrates, we depend on animals and plants for carbs and proteins, mayflies depend on stored energy from their larval stage, parasites depend on other organisms for transportation, food, protection, parenting, and even homeostasis. Viruses depending on other cells for reproduction doesn’t seem out of place to me.
Consuming resources is a definitive characteristic of living things. Scienctists had to define what life is and viruses just don’t click enough boxes. It’s the same as astronomers determining what is a planet vs a dwarf planet vs an asteroid or mathematicians deciding that 1 isn’t a prime number. There has to be a hard cutoff at some point.
Viruses are rogue genetic material that insert themselves into a host cell and hijack all it’s processes and metabolism. Calling them a living thing is like calling malware a computer, or a joke between friends a movie.
Ah, a definition of life in Namibia for a grade 12 course. Quite the scientific authority you have there.
Here’s a short paper (Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 32, 387-393, 2002) that refutes your position that a single definition of life is definitively agreed upon.
Here’s a paper (Synthese, 2012) on how a definition of life is impossible and pointless.
There is a species of dog that infects other dogs as a parasite. There are viruses with larger genomes than some bacteria. Obligate parasites and endosymbiotes often lose large portions of their genome and depend on their hosts for their vital functions. Nature doesn’t care about are definitions, and biology hates hard cutoffs.
Thank you for making the perfect reasonable and easy to understand points! Creatures with parasitic strategies have so many times been misunderstood due to they’re reduced bodies and functions. Viruses are the same case.
They’re robots! They’re machines!
Naturally artificial… artificially natural?
Sounds like something Nestle might try and get away with in the package labelling.
True! Here’s a little additional information since the north is in virus season.
A virus is a protein wrapped in a protective fatty lipid. Heat will melt the fat, then break down the protein. That’s why viruses last longer on surfaces and clothing in the cold season, increasing probability of transmission. A virus can remain intact on a shopping cart handle for up to 24 hours in the winter, for example.
You can also rapidly break down the fatty lipid using isopropyl alcohol, or break down the protein directly using hydrogen peroxide. Be careful using the latter. It can bleach or discolor dyed textiles.
Bats use heat to fly off their viruses, they get pretty bad ones, but when they’re flying Bats get really hot. So it burns them off.
Also, some viruses have evolved into us and ended up serving functions in the human bawdy.
Yup. Up to 8% of the human genome is comprised of ancient viruses.
Another example; mammals probably developed pregnancy using an Autoimmune virus’ genes in the placenta to prevent the fetus from being destroyed by the immune system.
As an example we have reverse transcriptase that is derived from viruses.
There was a Kurzegadt video about the virome recently
However, I can’t find it now and nor can I spell their name, so apologies on both counts
I believe you’re referring to https://youtube.com/@kurzgesagt
I think they’re on https://nebula.tv too, if you prefer that to YouTube.
That’s why I always carry a small bottle of isopropyl alcohol as my hand sanitizer. It’s also great that my local grocery store has sanitary wipes right beside the carts so you can wipe down the handle before using it.
Not really living, according to primates with limited knowledge, and arbitrary definitions.
We invented the word “living”, we get to chose what it refers to. We are necessarily right, because this is a truth we create, not a transcendent one. If we collectively decide to change the definition of “living” to include viruses, we will still be right but it won’t mean we were wrong before.
Our opinions are not homogeneous and they change in time too.
True, I guess several definitions of life may coexist with different implications and all of them are right in the right context as long as they don’t contain a self-contradiction. But in the context of this debate, I think most would agree that the best definition would be the one that has the biggest consensus amongst biologists, and maybe more precisely microbiologists. And most such definitions you’d find would include “self-replication” as a necessary trait.
I disagree. At one time, consensus was the Earth was the center of the universe, that the world was just a few thousand years old, that life just sprung into being sometimes, that unwashed hands were perfectly fine to perform surgery with, that some peoples were much closer to other animals than some other peoples, that the universe was static, that light was continuous, and that Ceres was a planet.
Consensus is nice, but usefulness is the gold standard. Is holding metabolism and a complex proteome as the limit of life --excluding viruses, preons, and mechanical reproducers-- useful to expanding our understanding of life and how it functions? Is taking replicators as the most important distinction a necessary step to understanding the origin of life and how we can engineer it ourselves? Will the ability to manipulate certain chemicals and not others help us describe the world? Are edge cases explained better with a genomic, proteomic, or metabolomic base?
I do know that we have a lot left to learn, and I would be very surprised if our current definition of life is fully sufficient for the next century of life sciences.
But words have no utility aside from being understood, a word is good as long as there is a consensus as to what it means, and you can always create other words for things it doesn’t describe.
Light acting like a wave in some regards and like a particle in others is something we can see experimentally, not just a matter of semantics. It’s a conclusion that experience lead us towards. Calling light “continuous” wouldn’t work because there is already meaning assigned to that word, and that meaning clashes with observations. Unless we changed the whole word and redefined the continuity of everything, which would be absurd.
That “operating with unclean tools would be fine” clashes with the observation that it can lead to infections, coupled with the axiom that inflicting bodily harm to someone is bad. The axiom could still be changed, but the problem with observations is that they’re imposed by reality, they would still be true even if we didn’t believe they were. You could also change the word “fine” tho. If you make a language almost identical to English safe that the word “fine” means “an unreasonably dangerous practice” the sentence “Practicing surgery without disinfecting your tools is fine!” is true in that language.
Ceres not being a planet depends only on our definition of planet. It was considered a planet for a while, but what led people to reconsider that isn’t just that it was smaller than believed, but also that there were many similar objects in the asteroid belt. Referring to all these objects as “planets” could’ve been an acceptable truth, but since that would’ve meant most planets known at the time are small and in the asteroid belt (the Kuiper belt and Port cloud weren’t known yet, but now it’s just mean most planets are in a belt), and if the likes of Pallas and Juno were included (as was the case once) it also would’ve meant that most planets weren’t round.
Since the previously known planets would’ve been outliers in several ways, a new word should’ve been coined for them. It seemed more simple to let them be the only planets and coin the word “asteroid” for the rest (and much later the intermediate category “dwarf planet”).
If a different choice had been made, asteroids could be planets, what we now call planets could be called “big planets” and dwarf planets would be called “intermediate planets”. This would be an acceptable truth, it wouldn’t contradict itself or observations. If it was the consensus, it would be true, but it isn’t so it’s false, it’s as simple as that.
If in the future we find a different definition of life more useful, that definition will be true then. But that won’t change what definition is true now. Ceres was a planet. Now it isn’t. Something can change category either because it itself changed or because the category changed, like how substances can go from being legal to illegal or vice-versa.
Sure, I agree with most of that. Dwarf planets not being planets feels intentionally confusing though, and the definition is basically Major/Minor planet anyway. A planet having hydrostatic equilibrium is such an elegant and applicable limit, yet the current definition specifically counts only bodies that clear orbits (how is poorly defined) around this star. It’s a bad definition in several ways, and many astronomers have already complained about this. Many use planet anyway, particularly planetary scientists.
It’s all about how useful the word is, and putting the limit at our star and a vague idea being the biggest thing in one general area feels more like it’s gatekeeping the word “planet” rather than facilitating understanding or discriminating something useful. Planets can change class simply by drifting closer or farther away from the sun, or even be temporarily demoted by a rogue planet.
most would agree that the best definition would be the one that has the biggest consensus amongst biologists, and maybe more precisely microbiologists.
This is precisely the part I disagree with. Consensus isn’t truth, and better definitions are likely possible. Not that consensus even exists here, the specific definition of life is controversial and several definitions are used in different areas. Homeostatic reproducers, replicators, entropy pumps, chemical system that evolve; it’s almost as bad as double-slit interpretations.
And most such definitions you’d find would include “self-replication” as a necessary trait.
Replication? Sure. Self-replication? That’s either an incredibly arbitrary limit seeminly designed to specifically exclude viruses, or isn’t applicable to anything except perhaps the entire tree of life as a whole. Where is the line of “self” drawn? As a human, you can’t replicate yourself, you need other organisms to collect energy for you and to make some proteins for you, and a sexual partner. Tapeworms need their hosts to digest food for them; cuckoos need other birds to feed and raise their chicks; E.coli needs other organisms to feed them and maintain a suitable environment; clonally transmissible dogs need another dog for all nutrients, and protection; and viruses need cells to provide the replication hardware. Some viruses even have some of the genes necessary for DNA copying and protein synthesis, and can be infected by smaller viruses themselves.
You joke, but it’s still a valid way of doing it.
If we are going be inquisitive in a systematic manner, we have to measure things in comparison, and to start doing that we had to start somewhere, in every single different field. Eventually we got to the speed of light as a constant, figured out the 1/137 fine structure constant, the helical configuration of DNA and RNA, etc., all starting from arbitrary suppositions, getting honed and adjusted by laboratory and thought experiments.
I’ve never understood why things have to be binary. There are traits we consider life like and traits we don’t. If you have more life like traits you are more life like. Simple as
As far as I’m concerned, it’s all just varying levels of physics. Strings vibrate, atoms bounce around, molecules interact, substances react, cells form, organs grow, and consciousness emerges. It’s just one long spectrum with a fuzzy and somewhat arbitrary cut-off point to where we determine it life
Physics becomes chemistry becomes biology
Oh for sure. No argument here
I’ve always liked Hank Green’s interpretation of life. In that it’s a dynamically stable chemical system. Rather than a statically stable one. Like how a rock doesn’t change much but a human is changing constantly. Yet both maintain their chemistry in more or less a balanced state
But physics turns out to NOT be a smooth gradient, there are steps, aka quanta, that’s why they call it quantum physics or quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics.
At certain steps - not every step, but at certain mathematically defined points - thresholds are crossed and things behave differently, more energetic or complex phenomena emerge.
Enough of your woke agenda. Keep politics out of science.
/s
eh. if it evolves, it’s alive.
Viruses are intra-cellular parasites with both a living and a non-living phase. The particle OP pointed to is just a machine the virus makes to make more viruses.
It’s the zip file, it can’t do anything until a system unzips it. The resulting program can be really small and still do a lot, especially if it modifies another program.
