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> The soap dissolves the fat membrane and the virus falls apart like a house of cards and "dies", or rather, we should say it becomes inactive as viruses aren’t

> The soap dissolves the fat membrane and the virus falls apart like a house of cards and "dies", or rather, we should say it becomes inactive as viruses aren’t really alive. I always presumed that viruses, similar to other microorganisms, are alive. Until reading the above quote, I had never considered the idea there was any question about this. I was intrigued by the concept that they many not really be alive so looked up the Wikipedia article [1] which says that > Viruses are considered by some to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, although they lack key characteristics (such as cell structure) that are generally considered necessary to count as life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as "organisms at the edge of life", and as replicators. One of the Wikipedia references is Are viruses alive? The replicator paradigm sheds decisive light on an old but misguided question [2] which looks at different replication mechanisms as a continuum rather than a simple “life vs non-life” dichotomy. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406846/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5406846/

m_eiman 7y ago
They're like memes, I suppose. Cannot live on their own, but replicate like mad when the circumstances are right.
- dnautics 7y ago
  The ontology on those concepts goes in the other direction.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    I don't understand. :)
- captain_crabs 7y ago
  A kind of concerning thought: who's to say there aren't higher-level versions of this same concept playing out? Say we figure out the nature of consciousness and are able to effectively interact with it's "thinginess." Then we find: there are things in our universe that're semi-conscious, but feed and replicate on/inside/with the consciousness of others and are incapable of existing on their own.
- wool_gather 7y ago
  You've formed a funny circle: the concept of a meme was explained by analogy to a virus when it was introduced. (In The Selfish Gene.)
- asadkn 7y ago
  You mean they go viral?
mcv 7y ago
Virus behave like life in some ways. They're made out of the building blocks of life, and are indeed subject to evolution. But they don't absorb nutrients and don't reproduce themselves. They are created by the cells they infect. But it's a thin line, and it depends on which definition you want to use.
- stoicShell 7y ago
  I, for one, as a human being whose root ancestors¹ infected planet Earth² which eventually produced me³, am will to use a definition that qualifies viruses as very much alive. ;-) ____ Tangentially related, I sympathize with Earth parasite Musk who wishes for us to infect another cell— err, I mean, planet. Shoosh, Earth, back to sleep, nothing to see here... ____ [1]: I wonder who's the chicken, here. Certainly, the virus is the egg, right? It's all a plan to engineer the actual masters of this universe? [2]: A long, long time ago... [3]: Well, the 10% of my weight with my DNA. I feel more like an ecosystem, I am a legion of species, a myriad DNAs, we are millions in those guts. "I" is not even the same "I" when travelling to a different biome: you are what you eat, quite literally, however you want to spin that idea.
- AgloeDreams 7y ago
  I have come to view them (from a programer's sense) kinda like functions and stateless services compared to living life which is like classes and other state-y things. It can change classes, it can be mutated and overridden, but does not think or act on its self, it must be interacted with.
  - CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
    Interesting. I also have a programmers model. But in my head the virus is the static artifact, the code. While what’s living is the process interpreting that code. Or rather SARS-CoV-2 is the nonliving static code. COVID-19 is the “living” process interpreting the code. Or your DNA is the code, you’re the living process interpreting that code.
    - wizzwizz4 7y ago
cogman10 7y ago
In my highschool biology class (that makes me an expert... right? :) ) The definition of life included self replication and, IIRC, having some sort of metabolism. The reason my biology book classified viruses as not alive is simply because they are incapable of self replication and they don't really have a metabolism to speak of (Old viruses are still infectious).
- SigmundA 7y ago
  Wait I can't self replicate...
koeng 7y ago
I work with some groups trying to build synthetic cells, and honestly there isn’t even a good definition for what a “cell” is or what “life” is in the scientific communities. The best proxy I can come up with, which is universally true on earth, is that life is anything that fully encodes ribosomes and can replicate (there aren’t any discovered exceptions to that yet, though some are close). Very intellectually unsatisfying, but so far factually true for anything generally considered “living”. Evolution/competition between ribosome encoding and capsid encoding organisms[1] has driven a lot of cool stuff to be developed: for example, bacteria and archaea (+ eukaryotes) gained DNA separately (presumably from viral infection) and retroviruses enables placentas. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19845628/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19845628/
- azeirah 7y ago
  It reminds me of a philosophy class where the goal is to find an accurate and all-capturing definition of what a chair is. It is tremendously difficult, perhaps impossible.
  - sosborn 7y ago
    That exercise makes me feel like too many people believe that accurate == perfect.
  - politelemon 7y ago
    I just tried to come up with a definition and I feel like I'm almost there but not quite. A chair is something you can sit on (but you can also sit on a rock) && it has a backrest (but the foot of a tree serves as a backrest) && it elevates you off the floor (but not all chairs take you above floor level very much) && it is manmade.
    - namanyayg 7y ago
      Also applies to a Sofa
      - 7y ago
aloknnikhil 7y ago
Time for Kurzgesagt (What is life?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOCaacO8wus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOCaacO8wus
- extropy 7y ago
  +1 the old homeostasis argument. In that regard viruses are definitely life. Maybe they actually are vastly superior to us and the hosts are just their air to breathe.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
It is sometimes useful to remember that lines are drawn by the human mind, they are not an inherent property of the universe.
- Digit-Al 7y ago
  True, but ultimately of no consequence to the discussion in hand. Nothing we say or do is of consequence to the universe, but they matter to us. Ultimately, these lines are drawn for our benefit, not the universe's.
twic 7y ago
As a biochemist, i think it's absolutely clear that viruses are not alive, because they don't do anything. No metabolism, no signalling, no changes in structure, no use of energy or materials. They just float about! It's only when they encounter a cell that anything happens, and then it's mostly the cell's machinery doing it. If i was a molecular biologist, i would probably think it was absolutely clear that viruses are alive, because they contain a genome, and proteins encoded by the genome, and they use the proteins to make more copies of the genome. What else is life?
- chmike 7y ago
  A virus is not able to reproduce itself on its own. Because of that I don't consider virus as a life form. I'm biologist, in case it matters.
  - SigmundA 7y ago
    I cannot reproduce on my own, I need a mate and food and water and air to properly reproduce, that is most life is dependent on its environment to survive including other organisms depending on their needs. A virus needs a host like any parasite, without the host many parasites would not be able to reproduce.
    - kazinator 7y ago
      A virus by itself does not perform any biological functions whatsoever; it just alters the course of events in a host cell. Potassium cyanide can alter what happens in a cell; that doesn't mean potassium cyanide is alive.
    - akiselev 7y ago
      On a technical level, whether something can reproduce by itself or not is defined by whether they use their own chemical machinery to produce the offspring, such as when a cell divides itself or organisms produce their own gametes. To be pedantic, all you need is at most two (or three, maybe?) of the right gender to reproduce in a vacuum (metaphorically) to make it a living organism. A virus can't reproduce with another virus that way because it can't do anything on its own other than float around waiting for a host, no matter how many strains you mix it with. The host does the actual reproducing for the virus.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
openfuture 7y ago
In Icelandic the word for life is "líf", there is also another word "eilíf" which is concatenated from "ei" meaning "not" and "líf" meaning "life". This word means "eternal". Therefore: The definition of life is "not eternal" (if you assume the law of excluded middle - actually the definition of "eternal" is "not life" :)
patcon 7y ago
EDIT: also a biochemist in a previous life. If viruses are on the edge of alive, then books and posters might be too, in some sense. Virus's are "life" without replication machinery. And what is a book but a similar sort of dormant form, without the fertile replication machinery of the [human] mind to remix it and help its ideas fuck with other ideas. This view of viruses and words as life perhaps isn't as wrong as it first sounds, and some linguists on the fringes argue that language is more like a semiotic symbiont that has "moved into" our biology, specifically our neural structures, like a creature moving into an ecological niche and modifying it to suit its purposes. Or as I prefer to think about it: maybe we're already cyborgs straddling structures of biology and semiotics. (See: The Leiden School of Language[1]). Maybe humans are just the first example of this language portion of our organism starting to venture cautiously outside of our biology, like astronauts exploring outside spaceship corpus ;) Reality might be pretty weird imho, and hard to see for what it truly is. [1]: https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_ind5AbdQaAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA331&dq=leiden+theory+of+language&ots=s00R6AM5rI&sig=MPm-VJY0InUgJNIPpA-wED0yUnY#v=onepage&q=leiden%20theory%20of%20language&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_ind5AbdQaAC&oi=f...

m_eiman 7y ago

They're like memes, I suppose. Cannot live on their own, but replicate like mad when the circumstances are right.

dnautics 7y ago
The ontology on those concepts goes in the other direction.
- jacobush 7y ago
  I don't understand. :)
captain_crabs 7y ago
A kind of concerning thought: who's to say there aren't higher-level versions of this same concept playing out? Say we figure out the nature of consciousness and are able to effectively interact with it's "thinginess." Then we find: there are things in our universe that're semi-conscious, but feed and replicate on/inside/with the consciousness of others and are incapable of existing on their own.
wool_gather 7y ago
You've formed a funny circle: the concept of a meme was explained by analogy to a virus when it was introduced. (In The Selfish Gene.)
asadkn 7y ago
You mean they go viral?

mcv 7y ago

Virus behave like life in some ways. They're made out of the building blocks of life, and are indeed subject to evolution. But they don't absorb nutrients and don't reproduce themselves. They are created by the cells they infect. But it's a thin line, and it depends on which definition you want to use.

stoicShell 7y ago
I, for one, as a human being whose root ancestors¹ infected planet Earth² which eventually produced me³, am will to use a definition that qualifies viruses as very much alive. ;-) ____ Tangentially related, I sympathize with Earth parasite Musk who wishes for us to infect another cell— err, I mean, planet. Shoosh, Earth, back to sleep, nothing to see here... ____ [1]: I wonder who's the chicken, here. Certainly, the virus is the egg, right? It's all a plan to engineer the actual masters of this universe? [2]: A long, long time ago... [3]: Well, the 10% of my weight with my DNA. I feel more like an ecosystem, I am a legion of species, a myriad DNAs, we are millions in those guts. "I" is not even the same "I" when travelling to a different biome: you are what you eat, quite literally, however you want to spin that idea.
AgloeDreams 7y ago
I have come to view them (from a programer's sense) kinda like functions and stateless services compared to living life which is like classes and other state-y things. It can change classes, it can be mutated and overridden, but does not think or act on its self, it must be interacted with.
- CuriousSkeptic 7y ago
  Interesting. I also have a programmers model. But in my head the virus is the static artifact, the code. While what’s living is the process interpreting that code. Or rather SARS-CoV-2 is the nonliving static code. COVID-19 is the “living” process interpreting the code. Or your DNA is the code, you’re the living process interpreting that code.
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago

cogman10 7y ago

In my highschool biology class (that makes me an expert... right? :) ) The definition of life included self replication and, IIRC, having some sort of metabolism. The reason my biology book classified viruses as not alive is simply because they are incapable of self replication and they don't really have a metabolism to speak of (Old viruses are still infectious).

SigmundA 7y ago
Wait I can't self replicate...

koeng 7y ago

I work with some groups trying to build synthetic cells, and honestly there isn’t even a good definition for what a “cell” is or what “life” is in the scientific communities. The best proxy I can come up with, which is universally true on earth, is that life is anything that fully encodes ribosomes and can replicate (there aren’t any discovered exceptions to that yet, though some are close). Very intellectually unsatisfying, but so far factually true for anything generally considered “living”. Evolution/competition between ribosome encoding and capsid encoding organisms[1] has driven a lot of cool stuff to be developed: for example, bacteria and archaea (+ eukaryotes) gained DNA separately (presumably from viral infection) and retroviruses enables placentas. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19845628/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19845628/

azeirah 7y ago
It reminds me of a philosophy class where the goal is to find an accurate and all-capturing definition of what a chair is. It is tremendously difficult, perhaps impossible.
- sosborn 7y ago
  That exercise makes me feel like too many people believe that accurate == perfect.
- politelemon 7y ago
  I just tried to come up with a definition and I feel like I'm almost there but not quite. A chair is something you can sit on (but you can also sit on a rock) && it has a backrest (but the foot of a tree serves as a backrest) && it elevates you off the floor (but not all chairs take you above floor level very much) && it is manmade.
  - namanyayg 7y ago
    Also applies to a Sofa
    - 7y ago

aloknnikhil 7y ago

Time for Kurzgesagt (What is life?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOCaacO8wus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOCaacO8wus

extropy 7y ago
+1 the old homeostasis argument. In that regard viruses are definitely life. Maybe they actually are vastly superior to us and the hosts are just their air to breathe.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

It is sometimes useful to remember that lines are drawn by the human mind, they are not an inherent property of the universe.

Digit-Al 7y ago
True, but ultimately of no consequence to the discussion in hand. Nothing we say or do is of consequence to the universe, but they matter to us. Ultimately, these lines are drawn for our benefit, not the universe's.

twic 7y ago

As a biochemist, i think it's absolutely clear that viruses are not alive, because they don't do anything. No metabolism, no signalling, no changes in structure, no use of energy or materials. They just float about! It's only when they encounter a cell that anything happens, and then it's mostly the cell's machinery doing it. If i was a molecular biologist, i would probably think it was absolutely clear that viruses are alive, because they contain a genome, and proteins encoded by the genome, and they use the proteins to make more copies of the genome. What else is life?

chmike 7y ago
A virus is not able to reproduce itself on its own. Because of that I don't consider virus as a life form. I'm biologist, in case it matters.
- SigmundA 7y ago
  I cannot reproduce on my own, I need a mate and food and water and air to properly reproduce, that is most life is dependent on its environment to survive including other organisms depending on their needs. A virus needs a host like any parasite, without the host many parasites would not be able to reproduce.
  - kazinator 7y ago
    A virus by itself does not perform any biological functions whatsoever; it just alters the course of events in a host cell. Potassium cyanide can alter what happens in a cell; that doesn't mean potassium cyanide is alive.
  - akiselev 7y ago
    On a technical level, whether something can reproduce by itself or not is defined by whether they use their own chemical machinery to produce the offspring, such as when a cell divides itself or organisms produce their own gametes. To be pedantic, all you need is at most two (or three, maybe?) of the right gender to reproduce in a vacuum (metaphorically) to make it a living organism. A virus can't reproduce with another virus that way because it can't do anything on its own other than float around waiting for a host, no matter how many strains you mix it with. The host does the actual reproducing for the virus.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

openfuture 7y ago

In Icelandic the word for life is "líf", there is also another word "eilíf" which is concatenated from "ei" meaning "not" and "líf" meaning "life". This word means "eternal". Therefore: The definition of life is "not eternal" (if you assume the law of excluded middle - actually the definition of "eternal" is "not life" :)

patcon 7y ago

EDIT: also a biochemist in a previous life. If viruses are on the edge of alive, then books and posters might be too, in some sense. Virus's are "life" without replication machinery. And what is a book but a similar sort of dormant form, without the fertile replication machinery of the [human] mind to remix it and help its ideas fuck with other ideas. This view of viruses and words as life perhaps isn't as wrong as it first sounds, and some linguists on the fringes argue that language is more like a semiotic symbiont that has "moved into" our biology, specifically our neural structures, like a creature moving into an ecological niche and modifying it to suit its purposes. Or as I prefer to think about it: maybe we're already cyborgs straddling structures of biology and semiotics. (See: The Leiden School of Language[1]). Maybe humans are just the first example of this language portion of our organism starting to venture cautiously outside of our biology, like astronauts exploring outside spaceship corpus ;) Reality might be pretty weird imho, and hard to see for what it truly is. [1]: https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_ind5AbdQaAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA331&dq=leiden+theory+of+language&ots=s00R6AM5rI&sig=MPm-VJY0InUgJNIPpA-wED0yUnY#v=onepage&q=leiden%20theory%20of%20language&f=false https://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_ind5AbdQaAC&oi=f...