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Viruses May be the Precursors of All Life
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Feb 28, 2006 06:03 PM
from the it's-alive dept.
from the it's-alive dept.
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. "
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Another Explanation for Multicellular Life 87 comments
DrJay writes "Hot on the heels of Slashdot's coverage of a controversial model for a viral origin of the multi-cellular branch of life, Nature has published an alternative model that has nothing to do with viruses. Ars Technica's science journal has the rundown on the differences between these proposals." From the Ars article: "It's funny that this proposal for the origin of Eukaryotes should hit the popular press at a time where Nature has just published a hypothesis regarding the formation of the nucleus that has nothing to do with viruses, but everything to do with parasites. The parasites in this case are molecular: Type-II introns. These DNA sequences exist in both eukaryotes and bacteria, where they can insert in the middle of genes without causing harm because they can undergo chemical reactions by which they remove themselves from the RNA messages the genes make."
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I see... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I see... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Uh (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Well (Score:4, Informative)
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
Parent
Re:Uh (Score:3, Interesting)
My bigger problem is the fact that, as a theological concept, ID is empty and vain. It attempts to promote the idea that we are created by God, without any desire to learn more. That defeats the purpose of theology (theo-logos: knowing God). Given that ID fits neither science nor theology (does not directly address how
Re:Uh (Score:3, Interesting)
The following thought experiment will help you to understand the principle of falsibility:
In the not-so-distant future, a team of archaeologists discovers a giant underground complex filled with technology significantly more advanced than any known to modern man. Radiometric isotope analysis seems to indicate the structure is at least a few hundred million years old. Further study of the various discovered technologies reveals an astoundingly complete map of all genom
Re:Uh (Score:4, Insightful)
1) we know life to be several billion years old, a few hundred million is a mere fraction of that.
2) a plausible explanation: the complex was merely a laboratory for extraterrestrial scientists who were visiting earth, studying the genomes of life on various planets in the universe.
do i get a cookie?
Parent
Good that you ask (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, facts wrong, logic wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
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 f
It's the same thing in the computer world... (Score:3, Funny)
Why mention intelligent design? (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't mention ID... (Score:3, Insightful)
>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 so
Not this crap again... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Submitter misplaced the focus... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Submitter misplaced the focus... (Score:3, Informative)
Hi, I'm steveha. The submitter.
Please read this:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178821&cid=14
steveha
Discussion? (Score:5, Interesting)
Precursion (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You are incorrect (Score:3, Interesting)
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 fir
similar to eukaryotic versus prokaryotic (Score:4, Interesting)
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
primordial soup... virii... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Welcome, Mr. Anderson (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Viruses without hosts? (Score:3, Informative)
Disclaimer: IANAMicrobiologist
Which came first? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 pri
Re:Still seems Chicken & Egg to me... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 th
Re:Here we go again...back 2 school (Score:3, Informative)
Doesn't everyone in biochem201 do Miller's experiment?
http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiolo gy/miller.html/ [duke.edu]
The unfortunate thing about the skeptics is that they seldom want to take into account 1) time, and 2) chaos.