this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Science Memes

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Smug Viruses (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 19 hours ago

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.