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Viruses May be the Precursors of All Life
steveha writes "The cover story for this month's Discover magazine tells of a recently discovered gigantic virus, Mimivirus, that has blurred the lines between viruses and bacteria, and spurred speculation that viruses could be the reason life evolved past single-celled organisms." From the article: "This is striking news, especially at a moment when the basic facts of origins and evolution seem to have fallen under a shroud. In the discussions of intelligent design, one hears a yearning for an old-fashioned creation story, in which some singular, inchoate entity stepped in to give rise to complex life-forms--humans in particular. "
Is objectivity dead? Is it possible for scientists to publish their findings WITHOUT stooping to the level of mockery?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Talk about a flamebait article. The two concepts are not mutually exclusive, and there is absolutely no reason to mention the latter except to stir up controversy and hatred. And with an article title like "Unintelligent Design", it's a safe bet this is what the writer was after. Good jorb, Mr. Charles Siebert of Discover.com.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
In The discussion of evolutionary biology, one hears a yearning for people to leave out the ideas behind itellegent design so that the scientists can get back to doing their work.
Seriously, what's wrong with this poster and slashdot editor for letting this through? Why did that need to be included for this to be talked about? Nice of the poster to inject a controvertial personal view in the end of his submission for all of us to flame about.
meep
>Is it possible for scientists to publish their findings WITHOUT stooping to the level of mockery?
Scientists don't publish their work in Discover. It is a news magazine with a science focus and a somewhat sensationalist editorial style. Don't confuse the hyperbole of journalists with the scientists writings. The scientists working on these things tend to publish in obscure journals like Virus Research. For more information on these things including some cool photos (these things are larger than some cells) see GiantVirus.org.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Those Mimi-precursors would not have needed cells to replicate, as they might have been what we consider proper cells and thus self-replicated.
The viruses need the single celled organisms to replicat
....or MORE so?!
RTFA. Most
RTFA. Most (known) modern viruses need host cells to replicate. What if the ancient ones did it just fine? But they they got bored of it and started exerting pressure on other proto-life to do their replication for them. What if all of the rest of early life evolved under selective pressure of viruses to be good hosts for them? What if were all the viruses' evolutionary bitches? Just that, you know, things got out of hand and one day the viruses look around and cats are eating gazelles and soccer moms are buying SUVs, and they're like "WTF? Where did it all go wrong?" And then they're like, "Wellp, time to clean house. Break out the H5N1. Will start with the birds."
Kinda like that. But less anthropormorphically.....
dum dum DUM.
It makes sense. A self-replicating nucleic acid form must have access to proteins and aminoacids to multiply... in the beginnings of life, these materials were readily available on the surface of the oceans (primordial soup)... when the first self-replicating acids evolved into unicellular beings (having the ability to CREATE a membrane), others evolved along with them (having the ability to PASS through said membrane).
Survival of the fittest. Those "protovirii" (term is an invention of mine) which couldn't adapt to the new environment of isolated (membraned) aminoacids, simply disappeared, or, to be more precise, were consumed by the other protovirii. It seems logical that the nucleic sequences with more "useful features" later merged with other useful sequences, obtaining things like the mimivirus discovered recently.
So it's not "random aminoacids -> hocus pocus -> living cells", but rather "random random aminoacids -> protovirii -> living cells + cell-invading-virii".
And THAT explains a mystery which i have thought about for so long... the existence of parasites and symbiotes. If an organism evolved, how could another organism evolve to take advantage of the first? The answer is that they evolved from the beginning, it's always been like that. Virii as the beginning of life solves this riddle with elegance.
Keep saying this. Keep laughing at this "debate" and dismissing it as the work of a few religious whackos.
Meanwhile, these religious whackos are getting elected to school boards and other forms of local government at an incredible pace. They are patient, organized, and willing to wait decades to reach thier goal of enacting strict religious law within our country. They are working the schools now because they know they need to mold these next generations into the kind of society that will willingly accept a Taliban-like USA.
Make no mistake. These people are playing hardball--the scientific community must play their game at the political level or lose it.
problems.
1) we know life to be several billion years old, a few hundred million is a mere fraction of that.
2) a plausible explanation: the complex was merely a laboratory for extraterrestrial scientists who were visiting earth, studying the genomes of life on various planets in the universe.
do i get a cookie?
By what criteria would you like to have it demonstrated? If you mean the large-scale evolution of microbes into mammals, I'm afraid then that there's no lab with enough time or funding to create life from scratch, given that we think it takes about 2 billion years under the most ideal conditions we know of for it to happen. The condition you are requiring for "proof" is ridiculous. I might say also that you have to create the Sun in a lab to demonstrate that fusion occurs -- but I could just invite you to a vacation on the Bikini Atoll for a smaller demonstration.
Adaptation of moths or bacteria to environmental stress is not evolution.
So, faced with an example of small-scale evolution clearly occurring, you dance to one side and and re-define the process in order to avoid accepting the unmistakable truth -- organisms change their forms in response to selective pressures from their environment. Good one! Nice to see that evidence doesn't really mean anything to you.
The origin of life itself cannot be shown experimentally. Nobody has ever taken any mixture of all 92 elements, none of which have ever been part of something alive, and created any life . . .
blah, blah, blah. Again you come up with the clearly-impossible requirements of proof, as you bloody well know we do not yet have the knowledge to reproduce biogenesis. Not knowing exactly how to make it happen doesn't mean the theory is invalid. And by attacking biogenisis you are also not really attacking evolution. You're instead moving goalposts far and wide to avoid the squarely-kicked points that you don't want to see.
Evolution tries to apply to living systems what applies nowhere else -- namely that systems left to themselves become more complex, rather than breaking down into simpler components.
Fundamental and bloody ignorant misunderstanding of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Try to grasp the complete implication -- left to themselves any systems of order will tend towards disorder. Our system is not left to itself, idiot! We have a gigantic ball of flaming light pouring energy into the system, which can directly be proven to drive evolution's movement. We even know how chlorophyll works in plants to make photosynthesis possible.
Evolution teaches that over large spans of time, simple cells evolved into complex animals -- even eventually humans. No experiment has ever been done to prove even the smallest link in such an amazing chain of events.
Again with the impossible requirements. What we do have is a long chain of irrefutable evidence from which the devoutly stupid avert their eyes in fear. An experiment is what science uses when the real world's evidence isn't specific enough or obtainable. You once again wildly shift goalposts across the field, because if you didn't you'd be confronted with a TEEMING MASS of indisputable evidence that didn't need to be experimentally obtained.
Evolutionists try to convince us and themselves, that complex living structures, such as brains, eyes, ears, circulatory systems all came into being without detailed instructions and knowledge of how put them all together. Hemoglobin molecules are very complex structures that have a very precise arrangements of atoms.
Funny, during the latest trial on ID, "Dr." Behe was unable to convince a jury of the theoretical underpinnings of this, and whenever confronted with any questions about it ID'ers are eerily silent on the details of at what juncture this complexity becomes irreducible. Do you have any math to back this up? That's usually what real scientists use to frame their quantitative proofs. What is the measure of complexity as expressed by a number, and at what "percent" or vector or whatever of complexity does a system become too complex to have evolved independently of intelligence? As an aside, any theoretical papers on this topic whatsoever would be o
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