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Hints of Life's Start Found In a Giant Virus
An anonymous reader points out this update on the world's largest virus, discovered in March. Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie were used to finding strange viruses. The married virologists at Aix-Marseille University had made a career of it. But pithovirus, which they discovered in 2013 in a sample of Siberian dirt that had been frozen for more than 30,000 years, was more bizarre than the pair had ever imagined a virus could be. In the world of microbes, viruses are small — notoriously small. Pithovirus is not. The largest virus ever discovered, pithovirus is more massive than even some bacteria. Most viruses copy themselves by hijacking their host's molecular machinery. But pithovirus is much more independent, possessing some replication machinery of its own. Pithovirus's relatively large number of genes also differentiated it from other viruses, which are often genetically simple — the smallest have a mere four genes. Pithovirus has around 500 genes, and some are used for complex tasks such as making proteins and repairing and replicating DNA. "It was so different from what we were taught about viruses," Abergel said. The stunning find, first revealed in March, isn't just expanding scientists' notions of what a virus can be. It is reframing the debate over the origins of life."
"It was so big we had to sterilize our lab equipment with a hammer."
How do viruses reproduce without complex lifeforms in which to do so? If it reproduces on its own, I don't think pithovirus can be classified as a virus. Then, in that case, what separates pithovius from the prokaryotes?
Why does there need to be a creationist explanation?
Do you really understand what creation means? It means something was created and in the case of religious creation, everything was. Why was it created? It's hard to say but nothing here is proof that creation doesn't work. It's just evidence that creation isn't needed to work. It's like a car, you can use a key to start it but you can also hot wire it and start without a key. That doesn't mean the key no longer works- it just may no longer be necessary to work in order to start the car.
In fact, if you follow the religious examples (creationist), god gave man dominion over his creations. He also gave him knowledge. And we know in the new testament, that Jesus says God is still working and so was he. So in essence, you would search and find an understanding that didn't require the need for a God to create anything in order to understand it and have dominion (rule) over it. We also know that God gave us free will and you will either go to God or reject him/her. Nothing prevents anything from being created when a being is above the laws of nature that we are bound by and understand, including our understanding of those creations which may be by design of the creation.
Expecting a supernatural explanation for natural events and understandings is not very scientific.
Easy: God created this big virus this way.
Alternative possibilities include:
The deceiver created this one this way after the fact, to confuse us.
The scientists are wrong and have misclassified this discovery.
God continues to create the universe, using evolution as one tool of creation, and this virus is a remnant of that.
Spaghetti Monster don't care.
http://www.scientificamerican....
Your meme has already gone viral.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
The sample being 30,000 years old doesn't seem significant because it's quite recent relative to the history of life, and even primates. The same kind of virus or a close relative is probably still around and the sample age probably has nothing to do with its size, but rather a happenstance of observation in that we tend to study old things harder than we do current things, and thus notice more.
Table-ized A.I.
You keep saying "We Know..." about something Jesus is purported to have said, or that "We know that God gave us free will..." as if these are facts. I don't know anything about any Gods at all, because I've never been given any evidence that any God exists. The Bible, or any other religious writing is just something written a long time ago (usually) by some religious people, so can't be counted as evidence for anything.
> It's just evidence that creation isn't needed to work.
Guys, we are discussing an hypothetical guy residing outside of, and creator of, TIME itself.
You, and all the others, make NO SENSE because you imagine creation IN TIME vs. evolution IN TIME, instead of creation OF Time, the universe, with all its peculiarities like emergent life vs. a patch to introduce life (which seems bad programming style itself, and probably not what the genesis and similar books meant, at all).
If you make a tiny effort and watch things from the POV of a hypothetical god who stands beyond the concept of time, there is no problem in creating a universe with free will agents and knowing how it's going to end up, or in creating an evolving universe that ends up exactly the way you do, or in creating a universe whose time extends indefinitely in both directions and so on.
Face it, creation and evolution are orthogonal issues, just as who and why are orthogonal questions. Those who prefer to pit science against religion, just founded the religion of science and I applaud them on their proliferation effort.
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I, for one, welcome our new virii overl...oh forget it, this meme is no longer funny.
Virii? Nitpicking, I know, but that particular abuse of the language makes me cringe, it really does, because it is so bizarrely and emphatically wrong on far too many levels.
Even if 'virus' had been the singular form of a latin word, the plural would not have been 'virii', with double 'i' at the end. 'Viri', possibly, but 'virii' would have to come from 'Virius', a personal name - check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
Finally, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...:
Etymology
The word is from the Latin virus referring to poison and other noxious substances, first used in English in 1392.[10] Virulent, from Latin virulentus (poisonous), dates to 1400.[11] A meaning of "agent that causes infectious disease" is first recorded in 1728,[10] before the discovery of viruses by Dmitri Ivanovsky in 1892. The English plural is viruses, whereas the Latin word is a mass noun, which has no classically attested plural. The adjective viral dates to 1948.[12] The term virion (plural virions), which dates from 1959,[13] is also used to refer to a single, stable infective viral particle that is released from the cell and is fully capable of infecting other cells of the same type.[14]
IMO, since 'virus' is a modernism - an old word used in a completely new way - it is reasonable to treat it grammatically as a modern word: one virus, multiple viruses, just like 'one bus, several buses' ('bus' from 'omnibus', but let's not go there). Apart from that, you would use a a nominative singular here: '... our virus overlords ...'
Mod parent up, he is spot on. The english plural is viruses and that's it.
The word virus has no attested plural form in latin. One could argue that if the word had a plural form, it would be "vira", though, since it's neutral.
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/fa...