That’s okay–after posting I thought of a more physically accurate analogy–viruses are a handful of punched tape.
What’s a non-bootable SD card?
Again, I’m not trying to disagree but to understand your analogy?
One that hasn’t been formatted with an operating system so that it can boot a computer.
I’m afraid this analogy isn’t helping me, as it assumes knowledge I don’t have. 
As far as I’m concerned, a computer is a fancy tv. One that I can use to type neatly formatted legal opinions.
How’s this for a strained analogy?
If a living thing is a TV, then a virus is just the remote control. If all you have is a remote control you can’t watch TV. But if you sneak into your neighbors’ house, maybe you can use your remote to take over their TV.
A computer needs an operating system to run. That was why I was specific about a non-bootable Micro SD card–it can’t do anything unless it takes advantage of the operating systemalready running on the computer.
But moving on to the handful of punched tape analogy–that is physically more accurate. A virus is a small container containing a small strip of instructions to be run on a cell’s genetic machinery.
(The analogy breaks down a little because some viruses have to carry along “hardware” for translating from one “language” to another. Viruses are not only weird, they are extremely diversely weird.)
BTW, if that Wikipedia article makes your head spin, you aren’t alone.
Just started skimming this paper. It looks pretty interesting.
Not sure if there is a universal definition but here are 7 traits of life.
[ol]
[li]respond to their environment[/li][li]grow and change[/li][li]reproduce and have offspring[/li][li]have complex chemistry[/li][li]maintain homeostasis[/li][li]are built of structures called cells[/li][li]pass their traits onto their offspring[/li][/ol]
Viruses are lacking 1, 2, 4, 6 I believe.
A bacterium cell can intake food and give off waste products. A virus can’t.
to my knowledge, a virus escapes a host cell, injects a new cell, makes copies and then those viruses escape. Viruses don’t grow or get bigger like other life forms. They don’t ingest nutrients, give off waste products and grow.
A virus can’t technically perform complex metabolic reactions independently. It can perform them by taking over a cell which has the machinery, but it can’t perform them on its own. A virus injects itself into a cell and hijacks the cells own machinery to make copies of itself.
A virus can’t respond to its environment either. It doesn’t move towards food or away from threats. It just wanders aimlessly until it lands on a receptor and injects its genetic material.
So viruses are kind of an in between between life and non life.
Living things move, they ingest nutrients and give off waste products, they grow in size as they ingest nutrients, they respond to their environment. Viruses do none of these things.
Viruses do however reproduce, pass on their genetic material, undergo evolution, have forms that can withstand the environment, etc which are signs of life.
Biostatic.
Right, I’m going to bow out of this thread.
I don’t know what non-bootable means, and I don’t know what an SD card is. I have a vague idea of what punched tape is, since in my one and only computer science class, we used punch cards to enter our programmes.
However, I don’t understand how any of that is relevant to viruses and the question I asked.
Since I don’t want to hijack this thread with my lack of computer knowledge, I’m out.
I would just give a rhetoritician’s tip: arguments by analogy can be very powerful, but only if you choose an analogy that your audience understands. If you choose an analogy that your audience is not familiar with, you’re going to get blank stares and incomprehension.
Okay, try this–a virus is not a record player, a virus is a record. Simple enough?
When I was a kid we found a Friden Flexowriter discarded behind a law office (no doubt because they’d gotten word processors with magnetic storage), with a bunch of used and blank yellow punch tape. We actually got the thing to work, and used it for word processing.
You may find punch tape to be an apt analogy for “inert life,” but I can tell you, when that thing was running it was very lively indeed–in fact, I would call it “profoundly strange,” myself.
I have heard virii can also crystallize like minerals, under specific conditions, remaining in that state until the environmental triggers that caused crystallization vanish. They retain their infectivity and virulence and go about their business as if nothing happened.
A virus is a bad idea made flesh.
In the debate as to whether viruses are alive, let’s bear in mind this is purely semantic; it’s an argument about whether something’s over the line, but that line can be drawn anywhere you like. To my mind, viruses are alive, but it’s just definitional.
This thread is cool because one of the paradigms humans have that is immensely hard to shake is the notion that the world of living things is a world of BIG things - things you can see. In fact, though, large-enough-to-be-visible life is the outlier, by a really wide margin, by ANY measure. Tiny life was the only life on this planet for most of its history, and in fact that period of history may always be the majority winner, since all life on Earth will end in 1-1.5 billion years. The majority of organisms and species today are microscopic. The prevalence of microscopic life is simply beyond human comprehension; a single human being carries orders of magnitude more bacteria than the number of human beings who have ever lived (and you can throw in all our non-homo sapiens ancestors; it’s still not close.) The number of species of microorganisms is not remotely within our capability to identify and count; a platoon of microbiologists would have little hope of categorizing the unidentified creatures living just in your vegetable garden before they reached retirement. (The miocrobiologists’ retirement, not the bacteria; microorganisms are notoriously bad at funding their private pension funds.)
We are living on a planet that is now, always has been, and always will be not built primarily for us. It’s built for germs. Hell, WE are built for germs. We will always be the underdog.
I remember reading somewhere the opinion that viruses, not humans, are actually at the top of the food chain.
If there are legions of unidentified microbes, wouldn’t at least some of them be pathogenic, and therefore be discovered and studied? I mean, there are thousands of species of unidentified viruses alone. Are the majority of microbes, including viruses, just indifferent to us or even beneficial?
The world belongs to microbes. Most of them can’t even be “grown” in a lab, so they’re not even easy to study. But some of them grow up to become presidential.
Giant viruses are huge — 100 times the size of normal viruses. When they were discovered 20 years ago, the journals wouldn’t originally print the research since they were too odd. They were thought to be a fourth branch of life, but this seems not to be the case.
Human DNA contains the remnants of ancient viruses. Some of this genetic material may actually be helpful to us: