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Cake day: January 7th, 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.


  • BakerBagel@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSmug Viruses
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    6 days ago

    Consuming resources is a definitive characteristic of living things. Scienctists had to define what life is and viruses just don’t click enough boxes. It’s the same as astronomers determining what is a planet vs a dwarf planet vs an asteroid or mathematicians deciding that 1 isn’t a prime number. There has to be a hard cutoff at some point.

    Viruses are rogue genetic material that insert themselves into a host cell and hijack all it’s processes and metabolism. Calling them a living thing is like calling malware a computer, or a joke between friends a movie.


  • BakerBagel@midwest.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSmug Viruses
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    7 days ago

    This virus on it’s own is absolutely useless and can’t adjust to it’s environment at all. A parasitic wasp is still a seperate entity that has it’s own cells and genetic material that covers all basic function of a living thing. A virus is literally just a protein coat protecting a bit of genetic material. A parasitic organism is still doing cellular metabolism even if it isn’t in a host organism, but a virus isn’t.