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Smug Viruses
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Viruses make the simplest prokaryotes look complicated. A bacteria has ribosomes to read nucleic acids to make proteins and enzymes. That's the cellular metabolism that a virus actually lacks. It's not a matter of calling a person a living thing while their cheek cells aren't. You can take human tissue sampes and culture them indefinitely if you wanted to, because those cells are still undergoing cellular metabolism, taking in resources and excreting waste products. A virus doesn't even have the ability to read it's own genetic material. It's a hostile instruction manual.
It's a hostile instruction manual which learns, adapting itself to its surroundings, constantly re-writing and re-inventing how it interacts with the world. Which is more than can be said about most politicians. Forget about physical anatomy, for a second, and consider the species as an organism.
It's not, and i am not going to keep arguing in circles with people who want to contradict basic and agreed upon biology.
I'm not contradicting anything, I didn't even use the word "life". I'm simply taking the perspective of the genome, and fighting against the notion that viruses would act as mechanistically as prions.