this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
527 points (99.4% liked)

Science Memes

11441 readers
842 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
527
Smug Viruses (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
50 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Consuming resources is a definitive characteristic of living things. Scienctists had to define what life is and viruses just don't click enough boxes. It's the same as astronomers determining what is a planet vs a dwarf planet vs an asteroid or mathematicians deciding that 1 isn't a prime number. There has to be a hard cutoff at some point.

Viruses are rogue genetic material that insert themselves into a host cell and hijack all it's processes and metabolism. Calling them a living thing is like calling malware a computer, or a joke between friends a movie.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

Ah, a definition of life in Namibia for a grade 12 course. Quite the scientific authority you have there.

Here's a short paper (Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 32, 387-393, 2002) that refutes your position that a single definition of life is definitively agreed upon.

Here's a paper (Synthese, 2012) on how a definition of life is impossible and pointless.

There is a species of dog that infects other dogs as a parasite. There are viruses with larger genomes than some bacteria. Obligate parasites and endosymbiotes often lose large portions of their genome and depend on their hosts for their vital functions. Nature doesn't care about are definitions, and biology hates hard cutoffs.