this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
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I’m no scientist but I’d say, “Do it reproduce? Do it evolve? Do it try to survive? Bruh, it’s alive.”
I’m no scientist though. Just an idiot watching thangs. :p
Not by themselves, no. They need to take over a cell's replication machinery for that.
Yes, as they are subject to natural selection.
I don't think so, they don't try anything to do anything, they just are... but the same can probably be said for most actually living organisms, including many relatively complex ones, so I don't think it can be used as a way to determine if something is alive or not.
But it did reproduce then no? Its just like how some organisms are surviving as a parasite. They need another thing to survive mostly as food. But in this case, as a reproduction method.
The thing, though, is... you take a virus, put it in a petri dish by itself, and it does... nothing.
It doesn't have a metabolism, it doesn't look for a host, it doesn't do anything... it's just an inert clump of organic matter. (Then again, probably the same could be said for, say, spores. Or pollen. Or raw DNA or even RNA. Are those alive..?)
But plug it into a cell and... well, it sort of breaks apart, injecting it's RNA or DNA into the cell, and... that's it for that particular instance of the virus.
Sure, the cell will then take that genetic payload and unwittingly use it to fabricate as many copies of the virus as it can... but at that point the original virus instance is just an empty protein husk... is it still alive..? Does “being alive” maybe not apply to individual virus particles, but to this whole process..?
Maybe being alive is not just a binary, but a scale (or something more complex) where you can fit anything from crystals or prions to us and who knows what else, maybe whole ecosystems, maybe the Gaia concept of a living world...
But we humans certainly do seem to like our black and white binary choices, even if viruses might be a triangular peg we're trying to fit into either a round or square hole...
I agree, the point is that we need to define "alive" itself clearly which as you stated, is currently beyond our understanding.
If being inert constitutes as not living then yes, virus is not alive. Their "evolution" is not because of their doing/needs but rather due to their construction. In that case I think virus is more akin to a poison. The substance itself can be not dangerous, but due to a metabolism process inside a specific organism/cell, it becomes a dangerous substance. The side effect in this case is just so happens to make another copy of the virus. But this process is prone to mutation as their building block is quite prone to do so, and we get the "evolution".
Yours is the reply I like the most.
Most interesting definition, I think, comes from contrapposto. Can it die? No. So long as it retains its "shape" more or less, it functions. If heated or denatured, it no longer functions. More like broken than dead.
It seems to fail the last criteria there. They don't actively escape or react to predation. For the most part they aren't actively "trying" anything other than to just float around and replicate.
It can't reproduce on its own, though. It needs a living cell to do that.