New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
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New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
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Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#2relevant radiolab episode here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/shrink/
Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#3anyone hear the theory that cytomegalovirus is a fragment of a gigantic prehistoric virus? a nurse friend heard about the theory in his medical microbiology class but I haven't been able to find much online.
Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#4I never understand why viruses are not life. Bacteria are life because they are essentially a single-cell organism and act like any cell in our body: they consume energy and produce waste. Viruses may not be a cell, but they can be damaged, they die, and they appear to be more than a simple chemical process.
Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#5I never understand why viruses are not life. Bacteria are life because they are essentially a single-cell organism and act like any cell in our body: they consume energy and produce waste. Viruses may not be a cell, but they can be damaged, they die, and they appear to be more than a simple chemical process.
Viruses are more like robots. They don't respond to stimuli. They just, do.
The definition of "life" comes down to splitting hairs. We don't consider something "alive" if its behavior doesn't change when its environment does.
Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#6I never understand why viruses are not life. Bacteria are life because they are essentially a single-cell organism and act like any cell in our body: they consume energy and produce waste. Viruses may not be a cell, but they can be damaged, they die, and they appear to be more than a simple chemical process.
Viruses are more like robots. They don't respond to stimuli. They just, do. The definition of "life" comes down to splitting hairs. We don't consider something "alive" if its behavior doesn't change when its environment does.
Don't bacteriophages have to respond to some stimuli in order to attach itself to a host cell and inject genetic material?
Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#7I never understand why viruses are not life. Bacteria are life because they are essentially a single-cell organism and act like any cell in our body: they consume energy and produce waste. Viruses may not be a cell, but they can be damaged, they die, and they appear to be more than a simple chemical process.
Viruses are more like robots. They don't respond to stimuli. They just, do. The definition of "life" comes down to splitting hairs. We don't consider something "alive" if its behavior doesn't change when its environment does.
>>Viruses are more like robots.
A virus is just a computer program that needs a Von Neumann machine (CPU) to run on. Following this analogy we could define alive by saying that the combination of a program and a Von Neumann machine makes the entity alive.
Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#8I never understand why viruses are not life. Bacteria are life because they are essentially a single-cell organism and act like any cell in our body: they consume energy and produce waste. Viruses may not be a cell, but they can be damaged, they die, and they appear to be more than a simple chemical process.
I thought the reason was that a virus has no means to reproduce without hijacking some other living thing's facilities with which to replicate itself.
Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#9I never understand why viruses are not life. Bacteria are life because they are essentially a single-cell organism and act like any cell in our body: they consume energy and produce waste. Viruses may not be a cell, but they can be damaged, they die, and they appear to be more than a simple chemical process.
Viruses are more like robots. They don't respond to stimuli. They just, do. The definition of "life" comes down to splitting hairs. We don't consider something "alive" if its behavior doesn't change when its environment does.
cyanobacteria don't respond to much either, they just have mechanisms to "respond" to their environment much like a robot
for a bacteria the most common response to environmental change is to die
Re: New Giant Viruses Further Blur the Definition of Life
#10Nature is not constrained by human imagination.