Always intrigued by this argument about whether viruses are 'alive':
"Viruses...cannot reproduce on their own and are completely dependent on their hosts. "
This is not a very strong argument? So many other creatures that lay eggs in a host have exactly the same restriction. Do we thinks some wasps are 'not alive' because of this?
Anyway, I'm a little startled and afraid of what these WhopperPhages are doing with those hundreds of thousands of genes...that's a lot of code.
It's not the exact same restriction. When a wasp lays it's eggs in a host, it has already reproduced. The host is just providing an environment to store the eggs until they hatch.
If, to 'reproduce' means 'copy your own dna' then that makes sense. But by another view the wasp egg is just another stage in reproduction, still needing trillions of chemical reactions to become another wasp.
Not so much gatekeeping as rigorously defined, when speaking about it in scientific terms. Colloquial uses of words generally have a much lower barrier.
I would say that viruses are not alive not because they cannot just reproduce on their own, but because they do not have any metabolic activity on their own.
"Viruses...cannot reproduce on their own and are completely dependent on their hosts. "
This is not a very strong argument? So many other creatures that lay eggs in a host have exactly the same restriction. Do we thinks some wasps are 'not alive' because of this?
Anyway, I'm a little startled and afraid of what these WhopperPhages are doing with those hundreds of thousands of genes...that's a lot of code.