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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. "
So, Agent Smith was right, humans ARE a virus. Replicating and spreading, consuming everything in our path. Who says movies aren't educational?
If video games are created by teams of designers and artists, how are they not art??? www.skylarscaling.com
"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.
... if it weren't for the viruses, nobody would see any reason to ditch Windows and evolve!
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.
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?
--
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
>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.
Except for the fact that Unix long predated Windows, it just constantly screws itself over in various ways.
DYWYPI?
While I find the idea that life originated from some primordial soup mix to be distasteful at best and downright inconceivable at worst...
o gy/miller.html/
Doesn't everyone in biochem201 do Miller's experiment?
http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiol
The unfortunate thing about the skeptics is that they seldom want to take into account 1) time, and 2) chaos.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
Hi, I'm steveha. The poster.
For the record, here is the story submission exactly as I submitted it:
Please note that I didn't put any personal views there.
Please also note that Zonk did not put words in my mouth. He put my summary in double-quotes, and then after the double-quotes he put some additional stuff from the article. He edited my link references but did not edit my words at all.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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."
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You can't handle the truth.
Don't all extant viruses require hosts to replicate? How could viruses be the precursors to prokaryotes? If they existed before cells, wouldn't they, by definition, not be viruses?
Disclaimer: IANAMicrobiologist
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
What is referred to as "the theory of evolution" consists of several parts. First of all, common descent - i.e. that the different species that live on earth (or lived on earth in the past) have common ancestors. They did not appear independently, but instead descended and changed from that common ancestor. The theory does not specify if there was just one common ancestor, or several ancestors (i.e. that life might have originated several times). Currently evidence points at one common ancestor, with no good understanding of where to put viruses.
This theory had already many opportunities for being disproved. For example, if it had turned out that the DNA of one species has no resemblence to very close species - so for example, if the DNA of a marsupial rat was closer to that of a regular rat then it is to a kangaroo. Or if the genetic code of species would be a patchwork of pieces assembled from other species, taken almost without change, and not according to a pattern of common descent. It is amazing that the DNA, totally unknown at the time of Darwin, shows almost exactly the same pattern of descent as can be inferred by looking carefully at the animals - i.e from taxonomy - even when one looks at parts of DNA that seem to have no function.
Fossil evidence provides another opportunity for the theory of common descent to be chalenged: if we discovered a bird in 2 billion year old rocks, it would be a serious problem for the theory of common descent.
Another part of the theory of evolution is how changes from one species to another happen. The idea of evolution by natural selection and random changes. Part of that theory is a mathematical theory, and can not be disproven. Just like you can not disprove that 7 is a prime number - if you accept certain axioms, then it follows from them. What is disprovable is whether the theory applies to the world - to the way species changed in the past. That, again can be disproved. Darwin provided one example - he said that if one would find even a single instance in which a feature of one species evolved for the sole benefit of anoter species, then his theory would be proven wrong. Thus, artificially selected species have many features that are only good for humans - increased fat content, wiered shapes and so on, which make the species they are in much less viable. If you found something like that in species that were supposed to have been naturally selected, it again would provide a serious chalange to the theory of evolution.
Another possible way of disproving the theory is if you found within the DNA of humans a single gene of a length of say 1000 bases (letters) (out of the 10^9 that we have) that does not appear to be similar to a sequence in any organism on earth. (Though it would be already an increadible challange if it did not appear in any closely related ape).
Or imagine the following experiment: take bacteria, and delete the gene for digesting a certain sugar. Grow them with that sugar for some time. If the gene suddenly appeared back, it would be a serious challenge to the idea that things change through random mutations.
Hey - that was almost on topic!
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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