7 ms·

What viruses "want" is to reproduce. Killing you is an unfortunate unplanned side effect. If only we could negotiate and agree to allow them to reproduce and n

• zecg 12y ago
  Epstein-Barr virus is close to that ideal, 90-95% of adults have it. Unfortunately, it's connected with cancers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein%E2%80%93Barr_virus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein%E2%80%93Barr_virus
  • hazz 12y ago
    90-95% of adults had it at some point. Most people develop immunity to it and so it doesn't survive in them. I'd say the most successful virus in humans would be the common cold, given how frequently we seem to get it, although it's more of a massive family of virii.
    • jbogp 12y ago
      No actually once you have it, you have it forever. EBV latently persists in the individual's B cells for the rest of the individual's life [1] [1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15546128 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15546128
      • JabavuAdams 12y ago
        jbogp, I'd be interested to chat with you about your experience interviewing with DeepMind (found that searching HN for DeepMind info). My contact info is on my user profile page. Sorry about the thread-jack.
    • henderson101 12y ago
      Virii is a nonsense word. Unless, Virius was your original reference word.
      • anon4 12y ago
        I'm afraid that battle is long lost now :(.
        • chc 12y ago
          Why do you think so? Virii doesn't seem that much more common than viri or viruses.
    • acveilleux 12y ago
      Herpes Simplex is another example. A majority of americans are carriers.
      • billpg 12y ago
        That can only be transmitted in one direction. Its Herpes Duplex you have to worry about.
    • eru 12y ago
      The common cold describes a bunch of symptoms that can be triggered by quite a few different viruses.
    • TrainedMonkey 12y ago
      There is some evidence that we went full borg on at least some viruses and assimilated them into our cell machinery: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15310846 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15310846
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
• teddyh 12y ago
  Like this? http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3254#comic http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3254#comic
  • MiddleEndian 12y ago
    Made me think of this one: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3091 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3091
• kingkawn 12y ago
  http://www.hhmi.org/research/cell-cell-communication-bacteria http://www.hhmi.org/research/cell-cell-communication-bacteri... this work is being done with bacteria, not sure it is possible with viruses though.
  • waps 12y ago
    While this is a communication pattern, it is still governed by evolution. Therefore, as a host, you get one vote. Either you live at least long enough to spread the virus a little bit, and you vote that what the virus is doing is good, or you die before spreading, and you vote what the virus is doing is bad. Let's get voting !
    • kingkawn 12y ago
      We must live, if not for ourselves, then for the trillions of life forms that call us home.
• bayesianhorse 12y ago
  "Unintended" side-effect yes. But not really avoidable. The very nature of viruses means destruction, competition for resources with other physiological processes in the host, and they only have a limited capacity to tune their reproduction for optimal transmission. Too little reproduction (and in the wrong places) means too little transmission, too much reproduction means too much damage and thus also less transmission.
  • dredmorbius 12y ago
    It's quite avoidable. The viral load in various ecosystems can be tremendous, and many are generally benign. Even the non-benign generally don't kill their hosts. An interesting tidbit from xkcd's "What If" series: individual cell mortality from viruses in the oceans is about 20% per day. http://what-if.xkcd.com/80/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/80/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vyanj/viral_soup_and_the_red_queens_race/ http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vyanj/viral_so... Jared Diamond has offered related observations on pathogens and parasites in tropical vs. temperate climates. It strikes me that an ecosystem in which there are periodic resets (e.g., killing winter frosts, or long summer droughts) offer a more amenable set of living conditions to those species not affected by those resets, whether by adaptation or technology.
    • bayesianhorse 12y ago
      So mostly people are talking about virus which can be actually identified and studied. Up until very recently this was pretty much restricted to those who reproduce massively and leave at least some clues. We know next to nothing about benign virus in eucaryote hosts (or at least I don't). Also, I don't think "benign" virus compete with pathogenic virus for anything. This may seem strange, but unless the organism is completely shutting down, and probably not even then, only an extremely small fraction of cells are infected by any one virus. That's why you still have a nose after surviving the flu. Any competitive mechanisms would have to be more complicated.
• learnstats2 12y ago
  This negotiation is rather weak since it doesn't recognise the passage of time. Once the viruses have reproduced to their satisfaction, they can renege on the deal when humans have a weaker negotiating position. That is to say, "Don't negotiate with terrorists." Fortunately the human/mammalian immune system does not typically permit this kind of deal. With a few exceptions: including HIV.
  • egeozcan 12y ago
    If killing you means that the pathogen can spread more rapidly, it will evolve to do so. I don't see the HIV virus gaining anything by killing the host as it depends mostly on sexual intercourse to spread. Correct me if I'm wrong, but, Ebola would have been a better example in this case, I suppose.
    • learnstats2 12y ago
      > If killing you means that the pathogen can spread more rapidly, it will evolve to do so. Sure, but killing the host is not generally the goal of a pathogen. Killing the host typically means the pathogen won't spread any further, and that direction leads to the pathogen's extinction. Or, the death of this family line, if you like. But, before worrying about that, if a virus does not address the immune system, it will not be able to spread at all - there will be no family line. The initial goal of a new virus is to evade the (highly advanced) immune system. Ebola apparently has a very naive way of bypassing the human immune system. That is, overwhelm the system, so that the host dies, but you have a small chance of spreading. This works, sometimes, for a little while, but not too much, maybe just enough to gain a few generations of evolution to try and improve your strategy. If you are already a latent virus in a related species, you might get a few attempts at this, as Ebola has. HIV does this in a frighteningly more effective way - a way which is more evolved - hide from the immune system while maintaining a route to spread to other hosts. This has to be a very subtle balance - hiding from the immune system is no mean feat. This is why I used HIV as an example - HIV somehow negotiates its own and the host's survival with the immune system (where Ebola has not been able to). The dance between immune system and virus ultimately leads to AIDS. Death of the host is not ideal for the local strain of HIV, but it had a good chance to reproduce in other hosts, so it's a good result for HIV as a whole. To become an effective and latent human virus, you need to evolve some sympathetic way of defeating the immune system that doesn't have a significantly negative result for the host. It's likely that HIV is still on that path, and Ebola might be on the start of that path. This is why we observe viruses to become less deadly and more easily spread over time. It's not necessarily true that this is the only evolutionary path, but the immune system presents such a huge barrier that you have to overcome this before meeting any secondary goals.
• shittyanalogy 12y ago
  I think the problem is DNA. If we could get rid of it we'd be better off.
  • smorrow 12y ago
    The selfish DNA.
• cJ0th 12y ago
  That's an interesting thought. It's like they posses "artificial intelligence", i.e. they behave like the famous paper clip maximizer.
  • TeMPOraL 12y ago
    No, that's just evolution - plain, simple and extremely dumb. Viruses don't really "want" anything, they are just biomolecular machines that run around replicating themselves and screwing things up; some manage to copy themselves, some don't - and this way, generation after generation, you're left with those viruses that are good at copying themselves in the environment they're in. Evolution is a statistical phenomenon.
    • saulrh 12y ago
      Except that, depending on your definition of "intelligence", evolution even as a statistical process fits most to all of the criteria necessary to be intelligent. Basically any definition of intelligence that fits the stuff you see in the movies will also tend to fit evolution. "Has goals, biases set of possible futures toward completing those goals, demonstrates creativity", and so on. It's just that evolution, as an intelligent entity, is utterly, unbelievably alien - psychologically, physically, and 'physiologically'. Which I guess makes sense, right? Aliens aren't going to have rubber foreheads and five fingers; they're going to be utterly unbelievably alien.
      • TeMPOraL 12y ago
        True, but it's a kind of a "null garbage collector" case. It's the dumbest type of intelligence, a random one. But it did also created intelligences less dumb than itself, if you view the evolutionary process as separate from the workings of human mind.
      • ajkjk 12y ago
        This splits into two points: 1. You're right, our intelligence is the same thing. Intellect is a statistical creation that makes us good at surviving. 2. But usually, when people talk about our intelligence and our having goals, they aren't talking about the fact that we statistically exhibit tendencies towards self-preservation (which is what we're talking about viruses doing). It's that we literally have conceptual goals, which can be written down ahead of time and talked about. aka you won't find a virus with a to-do list. Conflating that intelligence with viral 'intelligence' is kinda disingeuous. -- That said, I do agree that we might/will find alien life that looks nothing like what we expect and has 'intelligence', for some reasonable (non-virus) definition. I would not be inordinately surprised if we managed to find this in the motion of waves in the ocean, or in the swirling gases of the sun, or the gravitational interactions of the asteroid belt, or in tremors in the earth, or in hive-minds of billions of ants. And I definitely reject dualism and fully expect that a human brain simulated in a computer would be as intelligent as we are. I'm not sure what the criteria for an 'intelligence medium' is, but it seems to require sufficiently high entropy to allow for complex patterns to form, but not too high - there has to be enough order and especially a not-too-high temperature such that self-contained systems can form and replicate without being blurred back into the whole system.
• snowwrestler 12y ago
  Our ancestors have successfully concluded such negotiations numerous times: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-17809503 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-17809503
• Houshalter 12y ago
  It's like the foxes that over-populate, eat all the rabbits and then all die. The foxes would be better not to reproduce past the limits of their environment, but each individual fox passes on more of it's genes if it doesn't restrain it's own breeding. And so those genes propagate to the detriment of the community. You need very strong group selection to restrain breeding, and this becomes less and less likely as the population size increases (so each individual has less and less affect.) See The Tradgedy of Group Selectionism: http://lesswrong.com/lw/kw/the_tragedy_of_group_selectionism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/kw/the_tragedy_of_group_selectionism... Even when organisms are selectively breed by scientists with group selection to limit their population size, they often just become cannibalistic rather than restrain their own reproduction. Killing someone else's kids is better than killing your own. Essentially the same thing happens with viruses, where over reproduction means killing all the hosts cells.
• abandonliberty 12y ago
  8% of our genome may be viruses that decided to live with us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus?#Human_endogenous_retroviruses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus?#Human_en...