Are viruses living things?

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Consul
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Re: Are viruses living things?

Post by Consul »

One thing is certain: viruses are annoying things!
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Pattern-chaser
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Somewhere, there is a virus forum, and some witty coronavirus just posted "One thing is certain: hosts are annoying things!" 😉
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Pattern-chaser wrote: April 5th, 2020, 9:07 am
Greta wrote: April 3rd, 2020, 6:09 am
I certainly do. Many astronauts living on the ISS do too, so it's not too crazy a notion.

What is the difference between a colony and a thing? What levels of interconnection and interdependency is needed for "they" to become "it"?
As far as I know, it's an accepted notion that some colonies act as though the colony itself is a living thing. To the extent that many are happy to see those colonies as being alive in themselves. The biggest example is the Earth itself, which gives rise to the belief system I follow, in the form of Gaia. At a less abstract level, insect colonies are the most prevalent examples.

As to your final questions, I think a colony might be judged alive if it acts alive. A colony is the same as any other creature in this: if it acts as though it lives, we assume it does. It seems reasonable to include colonies in this.
Pretty arbitrary, more as per human perception than ontic. It's another blurred line in nature, messing up our simple categorisations.

I had previously thought that genetics would seem the major determinant. So a sea sponge consists of colonial individuals that are all genetically identical and is considered to be an organism. Ants, on the other hand, are not. A nest with a single queen will have female workers who are on average 75% related to each other, 50% related to the queen and 25% related to their (few) brothers. Highly integrated, but less so than sea sponges.

But pyrosomes proved my notion wrong:

Image

They are not classed as an organism but a colony of genetically identical colonial tunicates, each individual encased in a gel formed by material that each component organism produces. A pyrosome moves like an animal, with each individual squirting water together for propulsion. So, why are they not considered to be animals? Because every single zooid in a pyrosome eats independently. So, even thought their DNA is identical, the fact that they do not share a common digestive system is seemingly the determinant.

BTW I also see the Earth as both a single, systematised entity, while of course also being a collection of individuals.
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Greta wrote:What are the main similarities you see between genetic code and C++? (I was never a programmer but I worked closely enough with them to be in trouble under your "no comment" system. I used them so to easily backtrack if I bumbled, and to provide transparency (because I wasn't a programmer).
The main similarity between genetic code and programming languages is that they're both sequences of instructions that are read serially and used to perform actions. The RNA polymerase enzyme that does the transcription is a bit like the program counter which points to the next instruction in a program to be executed. But I guess one interesting difference is that, as far I know, DNA and RNA don't have jump and loop instructions. i.e. they don't have instructions which tell the program counter to jump to a different location (which constitutes a loop if that location is prior to the current location).

It's often said that large sections of our DNA do not "function" - i.e. they don't code for anything. This is the so-called "junk DNA". This is a bit like commented-out code. And just like commented-out code, since there is no selective pressure on those sections, they can become out of date or corrupted.

The classic example is the gene which codes for the manufacture of vitamin C in the body. Some other mammals have a functioning version of this gene, so they can manufacture vitamin C without needing it in their diet. Any individual of that species who, due to some random mutation, had a non-functioning vitamin C gene, would, in the absence of dietary vitamin C, likely get sick and perhaps die. So they would be less likely to pass this non-functioning gene on. But primates like us who have vitamin C in our diets are not subject to that selective pressure. So the gene can be steadily corrupted over time.

This seems to me directly analogous to a function in a computer program that might be called "MakeVitaminC()". If that functions is compiled and executed, and affects the output of the program, then if it contains any errors they will be spotted, either at compile-time or at run-time. But if it's commented out those errors won't be spotted until it's re-instated. So if it isn't re-instated it can get corrupted or go out of date with no "selective pressure" to stop that from happening. If, for example, the commented-out code refers to some variable whose name is changed, this won't be noticed.

So the rule I have written into my company's C++ coding standards which forbids commented-out code (based on rule 2-7-2 of the MISRA C++ 2008 standard) could perhaps use the corrupted human gene for the manufacture of vitamin C in the body as a cautionary example. But, realistically, it probably won't. Writing coding standards is, sadly, not as interesting as that.
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Steve3007 wrote: April 3rd, 2020, 3:14 am ...while locked down in my house, I'm currently updating a set of C++ software coding standards for the company I work for (on and off).
As all who have written one can confirm, coding standards have a sort of life of their own. 😉 I wrote the C coding standard for my company, and it's still in use, as far as I know. [ Our hardware wasn't up to C++, having only 32k (or less, depending on the product concerned) total RAM and 512k of program FLASH storage. ] But they're contentious, if we're not careful, and can lead to all kinds of social issues with the team. A difficult task. 😉
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Interesting posts here from Greta and Pattern-chaser.

It would be handy if, as in some other forums for remote communication (e.g. Microsoft Teams), it was possible to tag posts with some kind of simple symbol which means something like "I've read this and it's interesting".
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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I think your prose version is as good as it gets at this stage, Steve.

Prof Racionello has another answer to the question, that the virus is not alive until it infects a cell, where it goes through a living stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD7YLLyh_HE
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Steve3007 wrote: April 8th, 2020, 2:35 am It would be handy if, as in some other forums for remote communication (e.g. Microsoft Teams), it was possible to tag posts with some kind of simple symbol which means something like "I've read this and it's interesting".
Yes, a 'like' button would be good. It would say "I like this post", or "I agree with it, but have nothing to add", and so forth. We are not encouraged, here, to just post a "👍", are we? 😉

Is that what you're getting at, Steve3007?
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Greta wrote: April 2nd, 2020, 8:04 pm Love the interactive #D model!

What do you think, Steve?

I consider them to be alive because "infectious agent" is just a bespoke term to cover outliers like viruses and prions. There are many obligate parasites that require hosts to reproduce, so I don't begrudge them living status for that.

Viruses are different to other life in that they don't eat and are utterly unresponsive, until they land on a cell. Thus, some people describe them as "bad code". But does "bad code" evolve over billions of years, woven so closely into the fabric of life that they form critical parts of every eukaryote's microbiome and genetics? Seems like pretty good code to me.
It's good code simply for the fact that its ultimate origin is the host cells. No random or independent "evolution" could ever emerge by chance to so mimic the code of its hosts. No. all viruses emerge from bits of code that have been coughed up, spewed out, flowed out, flaked off, or ejaculated from higher life forms, be they plants or animals.
Viruses have no "evolution" without hosts since they have no life without hosts. If they are "alive" they are only so because they form part of the host evolution.
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Pattern-chaser wrote:Is that what you're getting at, @Steve3007?
Yes, pretty much. While working remotely, me and my colleagues are currently using MS Teams to keep in contact about what we're working on, and various other things. It's very often handy to give a simple "thumbs up" just to say "acknowledged" because normally that information would be communicated by body language (nodding or whatever).
As all who have written one can confirm, coding standards have a sort of life of their own. 😉 I wrote the C coding standard for my company, and it's still in use, as far as I know. [ Our hardware wasn't up to C++, having only 32k (or less, depending on the product concerned) total RAM and 512k of program FLASH storage. ] But they're contentious, if we're not careful, and can lead to all kinds of social issues with the team. A difficult task. 😉
They certainly do. This one does. I wish now I'd just recommended that we use MISRA C++ 2008. We already had a coding standard for embedded C, but we need one for C++ too.

Yes, anything about coding style is inevitably contentious. A few years ago I worked for a small company on an application, originally written by the company's founder, for streaming and analyzing stock market data. Being the founder of the company, and the software therefore being his "baby", he wrote the coding standards. It consisted of a sheet of A4 paper containing his personal preferences. Many of them directly contravened basic software design principles, but he was the boss. The core of the application was one, single, hugely long function from which the whole thing had evolved back in the company's pre-Cambrian era. That function was kind of like the company's mitochondrial DNA, or something. It was almost impossible to reliably maintain. It made me appreciate the importance of good coding standards, although on a sunny day like today when I'm stuck inside writing them it's hard to remember that.
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Re: Are viruses living things?

Post by Steve3007 »

Also: If my former boss's coding standards were so crap (I ask myself) why is he a millionaire and I'm just some schmuck, working for a wage, slaving away on a sunny day? There's a thought.
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Steve3007 wrote: April 8th, 2020, 9:49 am Also: If my former boss's coding standards were so crap (I ask myself) why is he a millionaire and I'm just some schmuck, working for a wage, slaving away on a sunny day? There's a thought.
Because schmucks like him sell defective products today, and carry on until they're discovered. By that time, their startup has made enough money to fund a bigger startup.... Small companies crow about their responsiveness, that they say bigger companies cannot match. Not so. Bigger companies have learned that they need to offer resilient products that can grow with their market and their users. And this growth means that the programs must change, as new features and new ways of working are introduced. If your code can't grow, you need to rewrite from scratch with every major change, as small startups have to do. It isn't viable. Only writing good code from the outset works, in the longer term.

In the context of this topic, was this old boss of yours a "living thing"? 😉
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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It should be noted that computer "viruses" are really just transmissable infectious diseases. Every property that computer code shares with a virus, it also shares with infectious bacteria or prions and many with toxins.

Despite the label, there are as many differences as similarities between computer viruses and the real thing.
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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LuckyR wrote: April 3rd, 2020, 11:30 am Regardless of the biases we put in the "criteria" for Life, viruses don't care.
"Caring" is an emotional response. It requires a brain and an intellect.

Viruses have neither, so they definitely do not care about anything.

They only infect, replicate, and then spread.

Viruses are like a cancer, and cancer is a disease, not an organism.

This supports the notion that viruses are NOT "alive" but are rather merely diseases.
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Re: Are viruses living things?

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Terrapin Station wrote: April 3rd, 2020, 9:48 am It's a demarcation criterion issue, or more generally, simply an issue of how individuals formulate their concepts. As such there's not a correct answer.

Typical criteria for life versus non-life include:

* Reproduction ability
* Metabolism and ability for growth/change
* Homeostasis
* Being made of cells
* Having a complex chemistry
* Containing DNA

Viruses do not meet some of these criteria--hence why they're often not considered to be living things. But of course we can simply modify the criteria, modify the concept, and they can count as life under a modified concept.
You Terrapin Station are coming at this from a strictly definitional perspective.

However definitions are simply false criteria.
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