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BONE DOG
Jun 7, 2009

by Fluffdaddy
mankind is a virus, a plague upon this earth if you will

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redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.
Yeah, they're called Republicans, OP.

BONE DOG
Jun 7, 2009

by Fluffdaddy

redshirt posted:

Yeah, they're called Republicans, OP.

mods please move this post to debate and discussion please

ArtIsResistance
May 19, 2007

QUEEN OF FRANCE, SAVIOR OF LOWTAX

Helical Nightmares posted:

Uh huh. And where precisely did you do your Ph.D. in virology? Viruses are obligate intracellular pathogens.

woah i didn't know i needed a Ph. D. to post in here, sorry guys I saw a bunch of dumbass posts and thought my education level was high enough

Helical Nightmares
Apr 30, 2009

itsgotmetoo posted:

Viruses aren't living, but they're creatures.

Eh. It is more accurate to describe them as nucleic acid replicating machines, particularly if you are looking at the minimum genomes identified like viroids or HDV which is a satelite virus of HBV.

redshirt
Aug 11, 2007

Reporting for shovel mission Sir.

ArtIsResistance posted:

woah i didn't know i needed a Ph. D. to post in here, sorry guys I saw a bunch of dumbass posts and thought my education level was high enough

Dumbass.

Virus U class of 64 grad right here.

Ogodei_Khan
Feb 28, 2009
It is actually interesting to note that it is only a upshot of ever presence that we die from them. I would not assign them intention or some strong teleological order that makes them kill us. Their presence seems to kill us and then them in some cases which is odd when you think about it. As for what is living and what is a organism, it is an issue not many want to touch. It is partially because the concept of living used to have a ontological status. Charles Wolfe has a work titled The Concept of Organism: Historical, Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives that is a good overview of it.

ArtIsResistance
May 19, 2007

QUEEN OF FRANCE, SAVIOR OF LOWTAX

Ogodei_Khan posted:

It is actually interesting to note that it is only a upshot of ever presence that we die from them. I would not assign them intention or some strong teleological order that makes them kill us. Their presence seems to kill us and then them in some cases which is odd when you think about it. As for what is living and what is a organism, it is an issue not many want to touch. It is partially because the concept of living used to have a ontological status. Charles Wolfe has a work titled The Concept of Organism: Historical, Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives that is a good overview of it.

a good post

Helical Nightmares
Apr 30, 2009

ArtIsResistance posted:

sorry guys I saw a bunch of dumbass posts and thought my education level was high enough

:ironicat:

Ogodei_Khan posted:

It is actually interesting to note that it is only a upshot of ever presence that we die from them. I would not assign them intention or some strong teleological order that makes them kill us. Their presence seems to kill us and then them in some cases which is odd when you think about it.

Yeah...with all the horizontal transfer of viral genes into the human genome it makes me wonder if there isn't some radically out there evolutionary benefit to organisms being permissible for viral infection. Since the human genome was sequenced, we know that about 8% of the human genome has endogenous retroviral sequences, but recently it was found that even negative sense RNA viruses (bornavirus, filovirus) appears to have elements of their genomes present in the genome of humans and other mammals.

Ogodei_Khan posted:

As for what is living and what is a organism, it is an issue not many want to touch. It is partially because the concept of living used to have a ontological status. Charles Wolfe has a work titled The Concept of Organism: Historical, Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives that is a good overview of it.

Well here is the thing. Nucleic acids self assemble spontaneously under the right conditions. We know this. At this point, this is less replication than it is thermodynamically favorable chemistry.

We also know that RNA can form ribozymes to carry out catalytic work.

At the extreme end of "replicating nucleic acids" we have these weird (cool) viroids that require a polymerase for high fidelity replication. Is simple replication of a nucleic acid sequence enough to say that replication is a foundation of "life". What if you consider that maybe the polymerase is error prone. To the point where a significant number of the genome has mutations but the progeny still contains the cis acting signals to recruit another round of replication. At what minimum point is replication just spontaneous self assembling chemistry?

Then wouldn't that make a feature like "metabolism (of ATP)" or a "cell membrane" (though we know liposomes form spontaneously under the right conditions too) a more important definition for "life" than nucleic acid replication?

Ogodei_Khan
Feb 28, 2009

Helical Nightmares posted:


We also know that RNA can form ribozymes to carry out catalytic work.

At the extreme end of "replicating nucleic acids" we have these weird (cool) viroids that require a polymerase for high fidelity replication. Is simple replication of a nucleic acid sequence enough to say that replication is a foundation of "life". What if you consider that maybe the polymerase is error prone. To the point where a significant number of the genome has mutations but the progeny still contains the cis acting signals to recruit another round of replication. At what minimum point is replication just spontaneous self assembling chemistry?

Then wouldn't that make a feature like "metabolism (of ATP)" or a "cell membrane" (though we know liposomes form spontaneously under the right conditions too) a more important definition for "life" than nucleic acid replication?

That is one argument made. I believe that is one view in what is called biosemiotics. Thomas Sebeok and Karlo von Uexhull made claims like that. Karlo von Uexhull should not be confused with his father Jacob von Uexhull. The claim was that life is characterized by semiosis. Semiosis is a process including meaning and interpretation. Molecules become interpreted as part of life processes that structure relations. One example is replication would be what you considered the error prone polymerase. The ability for it to cohere in different ways may be an emergent feature of a process.The problem would however be that it may not be a good idea to make the feature of metabolism of ATP as exhibiting the process of having the ontological property of life. The problem is that you risk making life analytic with some form of thermodynamic process.I say form because cutting off the part of that process that makes life or somehow gives things life as a specific ontological may not make sense. Why do we focus for instance on the agent or our designation of unity of a organism versus lets say the acting signal itself?

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ninotoreS
Aug 20, 2009

Thanks for the input, Jeff!
As I understand it, viruses have no metabolism, do not grow, do not excrete waste, can't reproduce independently, and -- the biggest one of all -- do not respond to stimuli. Thus, they aren't living things, or organisms, or 'creatures'. I'm just a layman vaguely recalling what I learned in high school, but it seems to me viruses are basically just a glitch in nature, something that's almost alive but not quite, and as a result can't (significantly) evolve and only exists to destroy.

Anyway, OP, you do realize there are plenty of viruses that ignore humans, right? The canine distemper virus that'll murder your dog gives zero fucks about the 6 billion hairless apes crowding the planet.

ninotoreS fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Feb 19, 2015

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