Researchers who study viruses, including the one that causes COVID, note similarities between viral strategies and those of insects and animals.
Tag: viruses
At Cosmos Magazine: Why viruses are considered non-living
It doesn’t help settle the ongoing debate that there is no single definition of life. Or that giant viruses like the mimivirus blur the line. Or that viruses share some genetics with host cells. Also, we often hear about the “strategies” of viruses. Which raises the question: If information had a physical form, would it be like viruses?
Why is an elaborate system for keeping populations in check supposed to be “evolutionary chaos”?
The caterpillar-wasp-virus predation system is complex but there is no reason to think it is chaos. It’s just more complex than humans might have expected it to be and perhaps more complex than we could design.
What? Some viruses use an “alternative” genetic alphabet?
This is a problem, all right. But really, why do these, or any life/quasi-life forms, have a “genetic alphabet” (an alphabet of life, not learning) at all if everything happened by natural selection acting on random mutation, as the textbooks claim? Let alone an alphabet of life they can just substitute some other letters for? Is there anyone out there who can do the math?
Of 70,000 hitherto unknown viruses in the human gut, over 40% of proteins had no clear function
The reader comments that viruses cannot afford to carry around much non-functioning nucleic acid. More likely, the 43% that are mystery proteins do have a function. If even viruses are much more complex than we expect, what chance that all these complex systems arose by natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism)?
At ScienceDaily: Cell defenses have evolved to turn the tables on viral attacks by using bait and sounding an alarm
Sometimes Darwinians are a parody of themselves.
Coronavirus lives in a world full of tricksters and does a lot of that itself
Nature is full of information and, while these viruses and cells don’t think, something in them does.
Viruses called phages, researchers say, are in a grey zone between life and non-life
Researcher: “Typically, what separates life from non-life is to have ribosomes and the ability to do translation; that is one of the major defining features that separate viruses and bacteria, non-life and life,” Sachdeva said. “Some large phages have a lot of this translational machinery, so they are blurring the line a bit.”
Something else to worry about?: Viruses stealing our genes
A new study promises to unveil “a novel mechanism that allows viruses to produce unexpected proteins.
At BBC: In case you wondered, what if all viruses disappeared?
We really do not know anything like what we should know about viruses before we just shut down our economies in a panic and so forth.
Another stab at Are Viruses Alive?
Hugh Harris: “Some properties of living things are absent from viruses, such as cellular structure, metabolism (the chemical reactions that take place in cells) and homeostasis (keeping a stable internal environment).” And yet, as he goes on to say…
Vague words in science: Vague or plague?
The worst part of witch hunts in science is that they so often involve controversies over words without precise definitions,
Is COVID-19 alive?
Villarreal and Mazur introduce a term that will be new to many— and relevant to viruses like COVID-19: quasispecies
Might COVID-19 be a recombinant of two pre-existing viruses?
Presumably, viruses don’t need to follow rules of heredity.
COVID-19 pandemic and zoonotic diseases (via animals)
The bad news, as you will learn, among other things, when you read the non-panic news, is that precisely because COVID-19 is much less lethal than SARS, it is apt to be around longer.