/sci/ - Science & Math

viruses scare me
do they move like spiders?

>>6326310
Yes and no. They use their "legs" to attach to the lipid bylayer of the cell wall. They don't physically walk with them.

>>6326310

Viruses are not generally motile. Motor proteins require an active metabolism to feed the protein ATP or some other energy carrier molecule. However there may be a retrovirus out there which can reprogram a cell to make motor proteins and fuel them. Theoretically possible though I'm not sure why it would want to.

>>6326288
>>6326310
These posts confirm my suspicions that everyone on /sci/ is in high school.

>>6326316

viruses don't "want" to do anything

>>6326288
Why? The central dogma holds true for the most part, the main cornerstone of it is that you cannot go from protein to RNA or DNA, which nobody's managed to disprove yet.

>>6326310
1. Not all viruses are shaped like that
2. No

What do you guys think about the prospect that viruses are not living things? Sure they dont meet all the criteria to be considered alive but then again how reliable can these be when some like fire meets more than half of them?

Do you think that its possible that viruses could eventually evolve into things that can react to changes in their environment and "eat" and excrete waste? If so what would be the implications thereof. Also do you think it is possible that all life evolved from simplistic "nonliving" organisims?

Should they not evolve, why? Perhaps they are already as advanced as they need to be

>>6326357
There is no reason for them to evolve new functions, they work perfectly fine the way they are. How would any of the steps on the road to becoming more like traditional life benefit a virus in any way, when they can already rely on their hosts for all those functions?

>>6326357
Fire is the light emitted by a transient state of a reaction you dolt, and therefore it does not qualify, in any sense, for any of the qualities which define life. You're confusing a self sustaining reaction for replication, and the consumption of substrates as ingestion.

>>6326357
>they dont meet all the criteria to be considered alive
That's about the only explanation you need.

>evolve into things that can react to changes in their environment and "eat" and excrete waste?
Will a virus, which is just genetic material in a shell, evolve into a self sustaining cell? So unlikely that it'd probably be safe to say no.

>all life evolved from simplistic "nonliving" organisims
Read up on the "RNA World" theory.

>Should they not evolve
Should they? Might want to read up on evolution too.

>>6326368
Finally someone who isnt in highschool drops into the thread.

>>6326342

What a profound insight. I never considered that a small bundle of proteins and DNA might not be sentient. Mind blown. This will save me all the effort I spend trying to communicate with my colds.

>>6326357

Biology and arbitrary categories go together like mud and anaerobic bacteria. The only important distinction to be made between the matter composing a cell or virus and the matter composing a rock made up of CHON is that one evolves. Anything that evolves will behave as life and promote the development of systems that enhance reproductive fitness over the course of generations. Anything that evolves is life. All other distinctions are window dressing.

>>6326368
Serious question here

Was the first organic material on earth alive? Was it less complicated than viruses or more complicated?
Did they evolve from life?
They do evolve, don't they. Rocks don't revolve. Criteria of life is an old definition, its notninclusivr only because we choose it to be. I'm not really arguing with you, the scientific community doles out definitions, I mean Pluto used to be a planet until they decided that it didn't fit the criteria. That's different, but I'm just saying, if a virus isn't alive, we have created a semantic phenomena for nothing.

If they evolved from the group like we did, they must be shared with the criteria of life. If they didn't, spawn from earth, then and only then can we propose they aren't alive.

>>6326418
1. Less complicated; probably amino acids, technically methane is organic though.

2. Depends on what you consider alive, but probably some RNA bound in a rudimentary membrane.
3. No
4. Try to organize everything more clearly, I have no fucking clue what you're trying to say...

>>6326288
Molecular biology central dogma was thrown out back when rRNA was found to be more than an intermittent transcription > translation molecule. Its just still taught to biology students because its still a good basic concept when teaching basic cellular biology.

>>6326433
Its been modified officially to be
DNA >> RNA
RNA >> DNA
RNA >> Protein
but
DNA>\>Protein
and
Protein>\>DNA or RNA

>>6326418

It's more plausible (imho) for viruses to have originated from actual cellular life. Possibly it originated as some form of cell to sell sexual dna transfer cassette gone astray (the cell destructive capabilities of the virus evolving after its creation) or just an evolutionary anomaly originating also from cellular dna. The first idea also better explains the origin of the adhering proteins and dna injection system, plus also considering that phage are quite prolific mechanisms for horizontal gene transfer.

>>6326425
Well most of my confusion stems from the germ 'organic' and mg inability to pinpoint the terms of where organic (not necessarily alive) material transformed into living material.

By my thought process, if organic material lead to living material, did viruses also come from organic material originally in the wild? Or did they form only after living things formed? Or did they form assome sort of organic mmiscarriage in between one of these events in history? Like some accidental bacterial conjugation that formed a new non living organic material capable of replication and evolution?

The strangest thing to me us how we say viruses aren't alive, but they do evolve?

>>6326418
>Was the first organic material on earth alive?
That'd probably be methane. Methane isn't alive. "Organic" just means "carbon based".

>Was it less complicated than viruses or more complicated?
The RNA World theory proposes life started as self replicating strands of RNA. These would probably considered more complicated since they can replicate themselves (a virus is just genetic material in a shell).

>Did they evolve from life?
Not sure what you mean by "they". No, organic material doesn't come from life. Yes, viruses share a common ancestor with living things.

>They do evolve, don't they
Assuming you mean viruses, yes. Random errors during replication may cause the resulting virus to be different. This could be good, bad, or most likely have absolutely no effect at all.

>because we choose it to be
Everything is because we choose it to be. Why is a second or a meter defined the way they are? Just because we needed a unit to measure time and distance and we made one up (mostly) everyone agrees on.

>Pluto used to be a planet until they decided that it didn't fit the criteria
Pluto used to be a planet until better telescopes allowed us to discover it's surrounded by many many many equal, or larger sized things. This became the kuiper belt and Pluto had to be removed from the list of planets.

>they must be shared with the criteria of life
Viruses share a common ancestor with living things, but that doesn't mean they get to retain the title of 'alive'.

>>6326464
That makes sense considering that, you know, viruses cannot exist on any meaningful level without cellular life. They may be a dead-end of an evolutionarily favored regulation method, hence the circularity of the whole virus-package system.

>>6326469
Term*
What a perfectly confusing misspelling

>>6326469
The whole "organic misscarriage" is probably the most likely assumption, given >>6326471.

Why does it matter so much?

>>6326469
>>6326418
I think your confusion comes from the fact that you're approaching this philosophically and not scientifically.

>>6326441
But still doesn't consider information stored in junk DNA, genome micro-structures and gene complexes. It's just a phrase brought up sometimes in papers (very few) and conferences to get a point across.

In reality molecular biology is just too plastic and under-researched for any solid laws.

>>6326464
Oh okay that sorta sums up what I meant to say here
>>6326469

Also
>>6326470
By sharing an ancestry, it would literally, by definition, mean that they descended on purpose from a parent. If implying viruses did not come on purpose, that would make them the metaphorical bastard of the natural world, caught between purpose and purposeless. Sorta poetic and sad how they are built to kill and nothing more.
You also went on to define evolution in a specific way for viruses, but evolution is random error, mutation, so viral evolution is no different than animal, its all ' good accidents'

This is still great info thanks for posting.
The whole philosophical debate is hard to untangle unless they really are just spinoffs of life.

I guess a virus is like the shrapnel of life, a misproduced disoriented biproduct of us


Maybe the intelligence singularity will view our specimens as unintelligible byproducts of their own eventuality.
I'm baked guys don't worry. I know I'm talking stupid

>>6326494
do you have any idea how idiotic you sound

I bet you're that kid who always tries to turn my bio lectures into philosophy discussions

what do you mean they descended on purpose from a parent? nothing really happens 'on purpose' in terms of evolution, it just happens and if the resulting organism can carry on its genes then it does.

>>6326494
There is no purpose in evolution.

>>6326327

>>6326555
Purpose in the context of not accidental
Not accidental in the context of being part of a pattern

If a virus was formed by some accidental bacterial conjugation, then it is an accident, unlike the natural 'purposeful' replication of a species through evolved reproduction.

Don't get all semantic just because I used the word 'purpose', I mean we are grownups here,.

Let me rephrase so you can debate what I'm saying properly, for fuck's sake.
If they came from slow mutation, like all asexual, or sexual, prokaryotic, or eukaryotic life evolved, then they were born from.a parent, a virus that existed before that virus. A parent would simply mean the virus that infected a cell to 'birth' its progeny, and before you get tripped up by the word birth and its constrictive formal definition, I mean it in the least biological terminology possible.

What I'm saying is, that by formal definition of the word ancestor, it is incorrect to term that viruses have ancestors. They do not have ancestors, because the original process they formed by was not the natural process of reproduction that works as it evolved to do, but a rare artifact of mutation that occurred during reproduction that at did not follow suit. An accident.
That means that they do not have ancestors. Ancestor is why the virus question comes up so often, and its people like you who use other terms improperly to further ambiguate the terminology we were trying to define in the first place.

>>6326592
see >>6326476

You've got to be trolling. Who gives a fuck if viruses have ancestors? Really. Im serious. If you tried this in a college lecture or, god forbid, a lab, you'd be laughed out of the building, and likely the entire university.

>>6326484
Who cares? Its a central dogma, not a unified theory. Those laws do hold, they are not plastic. There are no examples of protein's giving rise to or templateing DNA or RNA, and no examples of DNA being translated directly into proteins. You're overcomplicating a simple heuristic.