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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.
by Neeek 9y ago
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.
- runeks 9y agoHumans also survive by ingesting other life forms (plants, animals). We couldn’t survive without vegetation either, because it converts our waste products into useful stuff (e.g. CO2 to oxygen).
- Neeek 9y agoIngestion isn't really reproduction though, even if the dependency is there. I'm not saying it's a perfect definition, just pointing out that it's never been "consume energy, produce waste".
- chii 9y agobut it's unclear that this definition really means anything, because you can say that humans lack the facilities to replicate itself, without access to food and water and air too!
- Neeek 9y agoWe have the organs to reproduce provided that we, you know, exist... I'm not arguing how correct the definition is, more that it's what is 'textbook' from my understanding, and not really do do with the consume energy, produce waste comment or ability to react to an environment like some other posts suggested.
- novia 9y agoNeither do rickettsia or chlamydia, two bacteria. Honestly, whoever was deciding on the definition of "what is life" knew ahead of time the kinds of things they wanted to include and they worked backwards from there. We want to exclude viruses because they are too mechanical. There's no magic to them. That's the way it appeared before we started finding all these giant viruses anyways.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoThey're not more mechanical than cells are, and that's been known since viruses were distinguished from cells. But the presence of a cell wall is a pretty significant feature nonetheless.
- pluma 9y agoSo viruses are data but living things are code. Viruses are just malicious data that exploits unintended behavior of the code to replicate itself. Of course all code is just data. It's similar to how it's difficult to argue whether a data format is a programming language (Turing completeness is an obvious but unnecessary and insufficient distinction). "Declarative programming languages" muddy the waters but most people would agree that a JPEG image is just data whereas a PHP script is a program.