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Originally Posted by HedonistForever
Thanks oeb, an interesting read but I would be lying if I said I understood it all They seem to be fixed on the definition of alive or not alive, while I'm still pondering whether they are thinking or not thinking, if I do "this" will I survive or will I die and act accordingly. The "is it live" question seems silly to me because if they can change, they are alive. A rock can not change on it's own, so it is not a live.
So please, in your own words, do viruses change their behavior due to what they encounter and re-act chemically or do they have a plan that they can change after a thoughtful process?
I guess I've run into something beyond what I am capable of understanding.
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HF - you pose a very thoughtful question - and it is perhaps at teh limit of current understanding of Virology.
My personal take - an individual virus is not capable of thought, or independent behavior. a virus is a 'thing' - a strand of dna/rna inside a glycoprotein capsule - that attches by a receptor to a cell , injects its dna/rna - which takes over teh cell processes to replicate million more identical viruses -which destroys the cell as the membrane ruptures and releases the new viruses.
Viruses do change their dna/rna by natural selection - how viruses are selected out for survival according to the body's immune response. this is not a 'thoughtful process' - and viruses have no consciousness.
Thus - no 'plan' to 'change' - changes in viruses happens as natural selection - the process that engineered humans arising from the very early one-called species that created the blueprint for life.
A given - not intending to naysay anyone's religious belief in a higher power.
Food for thought - there are many things in nature we understand poorly as humans. I would agree that an army ant is alive - but likely not capable of independent thought /reasoning.
Yet colonies of army ants display behavior in hunting, colony relocation, and coordination of millions of member - mediated by pheromones - but how this happens is a mystery.
How a great biomass of ants can behave in a 'pseudo-intelligent' manner - I/scientists do not yet understand.
Could a large biomass of viruses coordinate for 'independent thought' - that concept is currently beyond our science.
Perhaps one day we will learn.
Corollary -' magic' - is just science - not understood by the beholder.
Imagine medeival monks confronted with gunpowder, firearms,lasers, and airplanes. How would they react??
for all our achievements - human beings are still fragile creatures limited to a very small biosphere on our planet - and much of space is intractably hostile to our fragile bodies.
And with our limitations physically - also comes a limitation of intellect - we may never understand teh cosmos - as so much is far beyond our reach - due to the limitation of teh constant of speed of light.
