Hints of Life's Start Found In a Giant Virus 158
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."
"How big was it?" (Score:5, Funny)
"It was so big we had to sterilize our lab equipment with a hammer."
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What is life? What is a virus? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What is life? What is a virus? (Score:5, Informative)
It can't reproduce entirely on it's own, so it's not 'free living'. It does need a host. It's just it doesn't need the host for some of the tasks that most viruses need the host for.
It would seem that, instead of being a primitive form that was at the base of the the genetic tree, it's more likely to be an offshoot. It hijacked some additional molecular machinery from an extant organism rather that figuring it out on it's own.
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If life started with a giant virus, and viruses reproduce by infecting living creatures... wence life?
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Life started due to a discarded sandwich by a distracted timetraveler.
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"Whence." Your spelling checker needs switching on.
That is one of the discussions elaborated in TFA : did viruses initially need life forms to replicate on? Or did they force the development of modern life forms. Or ... was there an earlier form of organism, distinctly different from modern cells (post-3.5Ga ago) and modern viruses (also post-3.5Ga ago) which held an intermediate position between modern ce
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Your sources who think that "wence" is an accepted spelling of "whence" are?
Re:What is life? What is a virus? (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, now I went ahead and read TFA. It's all complicated and confusing.
The current thinking is indeed that viruses are an offshoot of 'modern' life (modern being sometime after the archea). These critters, because they contain gene sequences that seem to predate the prokaryote - eukaryote split and because we know that bacteria just love to transfer genetic information 'horizontally' - that is by tossing bits of DNA and RNA around so some unrelated organism can incorporate it into their genetic apparatus as opposed to simply eating it - that it may be that these big viruses started sometime after the RNA hypothesis took hold and created the first self replicating organisms. Or at least helped those first 'organisms' diverge and multiply.
At least it's a testable hypothesis. Once you have sequenced a number of the big virus genes and compare them you would presumably get an idea how old they are.
It would seem that even if this mechanism held, the critters would have had a long time to morph into another ecological niche so it would be hard to pin down what their function was (if any) at the beginning of life. But perhaps the Central Dogma is barking up the wrong tree after all.
Re:What is life? What is a virus? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, in that case, what separates pithovius from the prokaryotes?
Structure, from the sound of it, although mostly this is people committing various fallacies of reification and making false claims of "natural kinds".
Everything is a continuum. Humans divide the continuum up using acts of selective attention. The only infinitely sharp edge is the edge of our attention (because we scale the edge to match the scale we are attending to, so whatever scale we are attending to seems to have a sharp division between the things we are selecting out.)
"Species" do not have particularly crisp boundaries in the general case: they fade into each other, and we draw edges around them in more-or-less arbitrary ways. When we find new varieties we can either create new categories (by drawing new edges) or lump them into old categories (by moving old edges). Which move is to be preferred depends on the purposes of the knowing subject.
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That is an exaggeration. Things grow as a continuum, but they can get separated when the parts in the middle die off. You wind up with a branched structure because things really can get far enough separated that when the middle dies off they can't reconnect. For example, mammals really are distinct from other tetrapods because the forms that connected them died off and they've been developing in different directions ever since.
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Everything is a continuum. Humans divide the continuum up using acts of selective attention
Your generalization is quite wrong. Humans classify organisms based on the evidence in front of them. Can you show me this continuum between a platypus and some other animal? How does that fit into the "everything is a continuum" that you speak of?
"Species" do not have particularly crisp boundaries in the general case:
Uh, they most certainly have extremely crisp boundaries. Species are classified by the ability of two organisms to breed with one another. There isn't any "crisper" boundary than that. Once two lineages are different enough, it is no longer possible for them
Re:What is life? What is a virus? (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, they most certainly have extremely crisp boundaries. Species are classified by the ability of two organisms to breed with one another.
The "Species problem" [wikipedia.org] shows this not to be the case. The specific issue you mention is in the introduction:
"Another common problem is how to define reproductive isolation, because some separately evolving groups may continue to interbreed to some extent, and it can be a difficult matter to discover whether this hybridization [wikipedia.org] affects the long-term genetic make-up of the groups."
That being said, I was taught the same way as you and only learned differently when I started teaching it myself. Now when I explain classification, I try to intersperse phrases like "usually classified as..." or "One good way to classify it is...". I usually try to reinforce that there are many ways to classify, show them the most common way(s), and encourage them to make their own classifications if those ways fail. This is especially prevalent in biology where phylogenetics [wikipedia.org] (usually based on RNA, dividing groups into clades) is currently intermixing with more traditional taxonomy [wikipedia.org] (usually based on morphological traits, dividing groups into Linnaean classification)[1] [wikipedia.org].
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platys and swordtails are different species and they interbreed without any hassle.
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very much so. and not only that, the hybrids are also fertile. same for endler's livebearers and guppies and sailfin x yucatan mollies. molly and guppy can also interbreed, although it doesn't happen that readily and the offspring is sterile.
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Consider the continuum as it extends over time and space. Everything is and/or was a continuum, but occasionally holes and tears in the continuum occur that cause the appearance of hard distinctions between species.
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Aren't you contradicting yourself? The wikipedia page says pregnancy can occur naturally. Also, due to the # of chromosomes issue, couldn't the 'rare' fertile mules produce offspring? (i.e. a male mule & female mule)
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Micro vs. Macro is a distinction only made by creationists and those that have been confused by creationists.
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Re:What is life? What is a virus? (Score:5, Informative)
There are many differences between viruses and prokaryotes, but the main thing that seperates them from life is that they don't have ribosomes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome). Ribosomes are necessary for the production of proteins and no known virus encodes thier own ribosomes (they use the ones from their host cell). Some viruses, such as the one mentioned in the link, do encode genes to make some tRNA (needed for translating the genetic code into protein).
This virus has been around for so long that (Score:2)
the others call him Morris Worm.
I for one... (Score:1)
I for one welcome our new viral overlords.
Humans and their need to classify (Score:2)
Maybe at some point we'll regard this thing as being on a continuum from mis-folded proteins to intelligent life such as whales. In the meantime, people will argue about whether or not it's really a virus.
IT'S ALIVE! (Score:2)
For God's sake, (Score:1)
Don't thaw it out! I've seen the the BLOB movie, I know how this turns out...
30,000 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A very novel novel (Score:1)
"Chantal Abergel and Jean-Michel Claverie were used to finding strange viruses..."
Is this the modern version of, "It was a dark and stormy night..." ?
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LOL :D
I can't mod anymore but if I could you would get a funny.
Now I want to hear the rest of the novel.
Article not written by nerds (Score:1)
They immediately recognized the organism’s viruslike shape — imagine a 20-sided die, with each face a hexagon
I'm having a hard time fitting together 20 hexagonal faces. OTOH, the herpes virus is shaped like a regular icosahedron.
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Truncated icosahedron, maybe?
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Congratulations. You've just invented the (soccer) football. While channelling Buckminster Fuller.
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It's possible that an organism might resemble the hexagonal parts of a buckyball but not the pentagonal parts if the pentagonal parts are uneven or convex.
Although this [kameleon.ba] looks just like a normal icosahedron. I can't find a transalation other than an automated one [google.co.uk].
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I can't work out how you can have the hexagonal faces of a buckyball without having the pentagonal faces, since the edges that define the hexagonal faces also define the pentagonal faces. I'm not sure that what you're describing is possible or if you're trying to describe a 5-cornered square.
Origin of life? (Score:2)
I think the summary rather overstates the case. This virus, if a virus it is, doesn't so much hint at the origins of life as it puts a new perspective on the origins of viruses. The origin of life probably lies much further back in time than the emergence of viruses, certainly if viruses are 'degenerated' life-forms, evolved from cellular life.
Seen in this light, this new virus could be a primitive virus; but it rather begs the question whether 'virus' is actually a well-defined, mono-phyletic group. It see
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After the Human Genome was published, I wondered why the fuck Craig Venter went off on his boat to do shotgun PCR on random buckets of seawater. Though this work isn't directly related to that, it's marking Venter's decision to forgo the complexities of culturing organisms as being a truly inspired insight. (And I'm not even a biologist! I deal with dead things and I can see the importance of this choice.)
reproduction & metabolism evolved separately? (Score:2)
Although we dont see pre-life metabolic fossils, some viruses could be pre-life reproductive fossils.
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Re:Yet another proof creation doesn't work! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Expecting a supernatural explanation for natural events and understandings is not very scientific.
I know, hence why trying to use the religion view of creationism isn't realistic.
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I'm not sure your sentence parses.
Are you saying creationism is not realistic or not realistic for a scientific understanding? I would agree with the later, there not enough information for the former.
Re:Yet another proof creation doesn't work! (Score:5, Informative)
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Lol.. stop trying to be funny.
We do know that religion (some anyways) holds those principles to be true. The "we know" statemment was clearly qualified by "if we follow the religious examples". Your personal knowlegde of a god or validity of a religious doctrine is completely unimportant to the context. The context is of what people who do belive could understand- not whether they were accurate or not or even convincing.
Please follow along.
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The context is of what people who do belive could understand
People who 'believe' in this context are incapable of understanding. They already have their opinion given to them from their beliefs.
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You mean just like you? Seriously, thats the most short sided stupid thing anyone could have said given the context.
You do not get to ignore reality in order to impose your own.
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You do not get to ignore reality in order to impose your own.
You are correct, I don't.
Religious people do though.
Let's see, a person who starts with a clean slate and thinks and questions can come to an understanding about something. (I'll give you the point that that understanding could be wrong.)
But a person who was brought up to believe something on faith just because their parents told them to believe it, or that they read it in a holy book doesn't really understand. Why would they, they never had to think about it, it may as well be a fact to them. They hav
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And the exact same thing happens with science. Most people do not posess the knowlege,, skill, resources, or time to verify everything science says. They have to take the word for it from some authoritive figure. It is no differnt. The more true something is, the more it might be repeated and hence we are on par with religion again.
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And the people making the claims in the bible had access to God or so the claim is. People to this day believe God told them to do things.
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People claim miracles still happen. People claim they talk with God, have a personal relationship with Jesus. That is happening today.
I get it. You don't seem to though. To most people, the claim that you recreated the science so it is true will be no different than me saying God told me to give you $20. When someone is incapable of doing the science for whatever reason, they are left with believing what someone else says. It's not difficult and I understand your rejection of it, But it is the reality we li
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People claim miracles still happen. People claim they talk with God, have a personal relationship with Jesus. That is happening today.
People can claim anything. I can claim that I am Jesus.
Religion has no evidence to back it's claims, science does.
I get that the world is a scary place and it's easier to believe that something is watching over you and protecting you but that doesn't make it true. It's not the reality we live in.
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No one said any of it was true. The AC pretended that no one was ever saying miracles happen since the bible was written which somehow makes science better or something. That was false which was the entire point of bringing that up.
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To the masses, there is no difference. Even to you, there is likely no difference for the most part. People claim they talk to God all the time, they say God told them to do something. God telling several people to do something is little different to someone who doesn't posess the knowlege,, skill, resources, or time to verify everything science says. It's just more people in robes (lab coats) telling them something is true.
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Sigh.. The high school science teacher (preacher) does not have to prove anything- just dictate from the book. The students (parishioners) have to learn it and accept it in order to get a passing grade and graduate. It all revolves around trusting that what someone else says is true. How is this no different?
And no, the scientific method doesn't make any difference to those who have no ability to check it. You are basically saying that because others will also say it is true, you will believe it to be true.
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Listen, I understand how you feel threatened by what I said. I understand how you badly want it not to be true. But we are not talking about those who can do the science, the entire premise was those who cannot. It doesn't matter who is here and not right now, those people will only be able to trust what you say is true.
As for miracles, try doing a google search for modern miracles and see what doesn't happen any more. People are still claiming they happen.
I'm sure there is a huge difference when you ignore
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Science at least can try to group peoples realities together into a consistent framework, we can choose to l
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My premise is nothing of the sort. It has nothing to do with individual reality but how reality is presented and accepted. No one said anything about anything being true or not, that is beyond anything I was conveying. The point is that it all boils down to someone claiming to have authority saying something and people either accepting it as true or not. This is because just like those people (who happen to be the vast majority) who cannot do the science for whatever reason, most will never talk to god or b
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Religions often say nothing that is falsifiable, and in that case can't disagree with science. Lots of religious people (probably most) are happy to believe things about the world we exist in when given the evidence.
Look up the Nicene Creed [slashdot.org] and try to disprove any part of it. None of it is actually falsifiable, which means it's completely compatible with science.
Religious belief also depends on experience. Scientifically, we know some things about these experiences, but there's no scientific way to
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::ahem:: Translation: Blah blah blah. God did it, that's why. God can do anything. We don't need to understand why, but he gave us understanding so we could understand that we're not supposed to understand the knowdedge he allegedly gave us.
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Evidently, God failed in giving you reading comprehension and you lack the ability to underdtand simple concepts. Your take on my statement is completely opposite of what was said.
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> 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 wa
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But if a thing exists outside of time, it can't have actions, it can't have causal relations, it can't create. By definition, if it is outside of time, it cannot change, either itself or anything else, it has not ability for "then".
So how does it create time?
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In general, you can't define anything outside your own level of existence and be sure it makes any sense.
Your objection depends on how our concept of creation behaves in our concept of time, makes no sense too.
But, if we abandon all hope to conclude anything strong, let's go one level of recursion deep: imagine a conway's game of life. what's time for one entity inside it? time is the succession of frames. That succession of frame is independent of our time. It does not matter that some time is needed to co
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Why is that ssme answer that is used to explain the mass for the explosion in the big bang not sufficient to explain a god's existance?
I'll go one better and give you an answer thst ypu cannot refute. We don't know.
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If you don't know what created the creator and yet believe that she exists, then why do you need a creator?
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Every explaination either becomes turtles all the way down or ends with an i don't know.
Now, i'm not sure a creator is "needed". But it is part of the religion so we got one. Religion doesn't typically search for something to believe, it is told.
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Compiler error line 1: "what/who", "created", are undefined concepts in the scope you are using them. You don't do that with code, why should you be able to do in philosophical reasonings?
First you define "creation" in the context of the domain of the hypothetical god (hint, you can't tell nothing about ANYTHING in it at all since you cannot experience it and if you could you couldn't prove you did not even to yourself).
Then you define "who" in the context of the domain of the hypothetical god, (hint above
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If God is a shorthand for the ground of being, then why do so many people go to war about which is the correct one and how you should worship him/her/it?
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It's pretty spot-on to what a lot of enlightenment thinkers and Einstein conceived as "God".
A lot of brilliant people have noticed that anthropomorphized religion is entirely illogical from the ground up, yet still felt that nature was too great and inexplicably law-bound to arise from the ground state alone.
I don't personally follow their line of thinking, and I'm not sure they would anymore either with the breadth of human cosmological knowledge, but I have always found that particular concept
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Though, that said, Einstein was far closer to an atheist by the abo
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While I generally agree with your pattern, I disagree with (e).
A religion begins with the guy with the revelation, as you say. These revelations can partly, but not completely, passed on to other people. Therefore, we have the real holy person, and a circle of other people directly affected. At this point, there's no real point in hierarchy, aside from the prophet/follower one. Then the guy with the revelation dies, and leaves a legacy based on what he or she said, as well as followers who carry part
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Just to confirm - it's not the Chuck Norris film is it?
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The big problem I have with this is the "ground of being" idea. In one case you're describing it as laws of physics, and that's not really "the foundation from which all of existence springs". It's more of a description of what things do when there are things. Unless future physics takes a turn I really don't expect, it won't explain why there is a Universe (anthropic principles are not laws of physics). It isn't clear to me that "why is there a Universe?" is actually a real question instead of a confu
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In absence of gravity, of course, you take two turtles, put one against the other. They will attract each other. Now put all other turtles on these two. Now it's turtles all the way down. So you typed all this when "turtles all the way down" is a completely acceptable answer to parent post.
A god created god ad infinitum, with optional looping, why not? because doesn't fit our infinitesimal brain? That's not a valid objection. A valid objection is that this requires the concept of creation to be valid in al
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Yes and no. In the strict sense, there will be exceptions but yes, being able to act without regard to the laws of nature that the appearant world is bound by would qualify as supernatural.
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No, God did give msn knowlege. Before Adam tasted the apple, God brought all the animals and stuff before him snd told him to name them. He had quite a bit of knowlege before the apple came into play.
Re:Yet another proof creation doesn't work! (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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Satan created viruses to confuse Man about the origin of life, along with fossils, typesetting, and the ideal gas law. The combination of these makes a terrible sound and smell which often induces violent diarrhea that is nicknamed the Devil's Movement or Old Nick's Bowels.
This has been proven by the frequency at which virologists and paleontologists buy anti-diarrhea medication, often at ten times that of the general public. So if you see or smell something funny, it is surely the Devil's work trying to mi
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God likes 'em big
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Re:Well (Score:4, Funny)
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I, for one, welcome our new virii overl...oh forget it, this meme is no longer funny.
Especially since the virii have been our overloads all along!
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I, for one, welcome our new virii overl...oh forget it, this meme is no longer funny.
Especially since the virii have been our overloads all along!
Speaking on behalf of many dead Romans, the proper plural for virus is "viruses". Latin's plural forms are much less simple than English ones.
But I'm fighting a losing pedantic battle here. The "virii" spelling went viral long ago.
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Score: +1, Used to be funny
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Nobody else around here lets that kind of thing stop them.
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"Nobody else around here lets that kind of thing stop them."
He didn't let it stop him either.
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Re:Well (Score:5, Informative)
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... [wikipedia.org]
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... [wikipedia.org]
Finally, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... [wikipedia.org]:
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 ...'
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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... [linuxmafia.com]
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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.
[...]
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 ...'
Buses? 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.
The correct plural of bus is bi. (Unless you're talking about the London double-decker variety, in which case it's bii.)
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Other nitpick: aside from the wrong plural, it was in a place that doesn't take a plural. "Our new virus overlords" is grammatically correct, if trite. Compare "our new viruses overlords".
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This comment now stands moderated at 'Redundant'. Which is just about perfect. I wish there was a way to make sure it stays that way :)
(Yes, that was more or less a joke)
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Why? He's not likely to need breathing apparatus to manage poison gas (H2S), so why should he scrape his beard off to conform to your aesthetics?