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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. "
"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."
Actually, I just hear a bunch of idiots trying to take a fable from 2 thousand years ago and use it to explain things in place of modern science.
Yeah, it's too bad the focus of the submitter was on the Intelligent Design snippet --- probably the least interesting bit in the article. The most fascinating stuff to a non-specialist like me was the complexity in the genetic code. Much more complex, I gather, than other members of the virus family so far discovered, and in fact sharing some genetic coding with "higher" animals? Wow --- that kind of thing really illusrates what makes science so fascinating.
What discussion? The whole topic of creationism/intelligent design is only being discussed in the US. The problem is that we have too many unteachable people in the US who take every nonsense for granted as soon as it gets the religious smoke screen. And the media in the US love this topic because it allows them to spread their pitiful program 24*7. Not only scientists, but also almost the entire world have put this "discussion" to rest. If you find it mentioned in European media, then only with reference to the difficulties in the US. This is not a discussion. It is comedy.
of course bacteria have their own virus like properties. For example, they serialize their objectes and multi-cast them to other bacteria for remote processing. Sometimes data values from that compuation. That is to say, bacteria have plasmids which a small usually circular chunks of data that are docked along side their primary dna. these plasmids are processed by the local host bacteria to get it's data and instructions. But it can also give these plasmids to other bacteria and accept them. That's how for example, antibiotic resistance is commonly propagated. The instructions for it get put on a plasmid and distibuted to other bacteria for use. thus like viruses this enable the net DNA of the host to change after birth.
In separate analogy. It's interesting to notice that like von neumann's architecture DNA intersperses data and instructions. And of course we also get buffer overflow error too where data becomes instructions. I've foundit intriguing that Von Neuman also felt this ambiguity was more powerful than separation of data and instructions. These days keeping the separate is of course a big problem in robust programming. Yet life, the ultimate robust system, does the same thing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Most viruses are RNA coated with proteins the RNA generates from its environment. The earliest self-replicating molecule type we can document is RNA, though prions might turn up now that we know a little bit about them. Prions aren't as durable as RNA, so finding ancient evidence of them might be harder. But once we do, might we not start saying prions are the precursors of all life?
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make install -not war
viruses certainly play a roll in evolution: they are mercenary gene transfer mechanisms, even across species
as to the roll they played in the very beginning, it's my personal belief they were there from the start, swapping dna between proto-bacteria. i think self-replicating dna came first, then one day a miraculous/ fortuitous event happened: one of the self-replicating dna got swallowed by a little oil droplet, a bag, a micelle, and in this contained environment, was allowed to direct it's self-replication in a more controlled manner. this protobacteria's dna most definitely still had a life outside the oil droplets where it could still self-replicate. so therefore the first "virus" was still self-supporting. but then, parasitically, it devolved and co-evolved with the proto-bacteria to get a free ride: get its energy source for its replication from its new more stable proto-bacteria
this oil micelle adapation was only one miraculous/ fortuitous moment. the prokaryotes, bacteria, are very simple: loose dna floating around inside a capsule. the eukaryotes are highly regimented: they have organelles throughout the cell, one of which, the mitochondria, has its own genome
how did that happen?
it can only mean, one fortuitous day, billions of years ago, one cell swallowed another and instead of being digested, the swallowed cell made "food" (atp, other energetic molecules) for the master cell
and the rest is history. our genetic history. without that one fortuitous moment, whenever and wherever it happened so long ago, life as we know it would not be the same in the most radical of ways. perhaps the earth would still be just bacterial and algal mats. perhaps life would still evolve more complex, but in ways utterly alien to how they are now
so there is, in a way, many such "miraculous", if you believe in intelligent design, or "fortuitous", if you believe in undirected evolution, throughout our history as life
and in the end, it doesn't matter which way you view it: god-directed or random, as long as you agree it HAPPENED
the real problem with the intelligent design crowd is when they deny basic facts
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Um, no. Viruses don't consume anything, since they don't have a metabolism. Agent Smith (and all the other agents too), on the other hand, uses human hosts to replicate, and is therefore a virus himself.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Instead of trolling, why not try to educate.
The use of the term "prion" might not be absolutely correct since it was originally used to describe an infectious agent. However, the idea that a protein with two conformations - one as produced by a simpler biological process, and another which can alter a protein that's in the first conformation by putting it in the second conformation - might be fundamental to early biological systems, is a valid hypothesis.
In fact, it's possible (perhaps likely) that the first self-propagating (and therefore, arguably biological) chemical systems had nothing to do with RNA at all. But once the RNA (and then DNA) regimes took over, surviving instances of those chemical systems most likely were food for more advanced systems, which explains why evidence of the earliest parts of life's evolutionary trajectory is so hard to come by.
Now these people will tend to go back to hard-core creationism once they realise ID is a crock, but that is better than that horror mix of mythology and pseudo-science called ID. Pure Theology wins against ID every time in my opinion, as at least it is internally consistent, and doesn't try to deceive and pervert.
I had the displeasure of sitting through a seminar by some ID people the other week. The demonstrations, which were prepared by "PhD Biologists" had all kinds of factual errors, lies-by-ommision and misdirection. There is no way that I can accept that God's Message is spread by the deliberate use of lies, so I have to come to the conclusion that the ID people (and the publishers of "Creation" magazine) are doing the work of someone other than God as I know him.
I know many Christians who believe that ID is probably some kind of scheme to erode Christian values, as well as to make Christians seem ridiculous and hence to invalidate their other statements. I can't say that's my view, but it is that of many.
The Matrix is definitely one of the most profound movies of all time. The dialog by Agent Smith has these words:
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
This may as well just be it - the actual truth.
The discovery of Mimivirus lends weight to one of the more compelling theories discussed at Les Treilles. Back when the three domains of life were emerging, a large DNA virus very much like Mimi may have made its way inside a bacterium or an archaean and, rather than killing it, harmlessly persisted there. The eukaryotic cell nucleus and large, complex DNA viruses like Mimi share a compelling number of biological traits. They both replicate in the cell cytoplasm, and on doing so, each uses the same machinery within the cytoplasm to form a new membrane around itself. They both have certain enzymes for capping messenger RNA, and they both have linear chromosomes rather than the circular ones typically found in a bacterium.
"If this is true," Forterre has said of the viral-nucleus hypothesis, "then we are all basically descended from viruses."
Follow the white rabbi
You can't handle the truth.