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Comment by mncharity | Hacker News Reader

> A virus isn't considered life because they do not follow all of the characteristics of life. This lists consists of:

The list is regrettably a "science-education-ism". My phrase - I don't know of a real one... anyone? A divergence between science-education community practice and science community practice. A rather dramatic one. In actual science practice, "is it alive?" isn't an interesting question, and has none of the importance science-education content often places on it. And people who actually work with viruses, consider them alive. It's perhaps regrettable that so much education content presents the list as science, rather than as an education device. And even as a device it has difficulties, as it doesn't deal well with the richness of biology, including around parasitism, and a binary sort just isn't useful.

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> "science-education-ism". My phrase - I don't know of a real one... anyone?

Ever since I first read it in "The Science of Discworld" I've called that "Lies-to-children" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children):

A lie-to-children (plural lies-to-children) is a simplified explanation of technical or complex subjects as a teaching method for children and laypeople.

Thanks. I also had in mind the idea of a topic that's taught as if it was important to the field, but isn't, independently of its accuracy. So "question doesn't arise", rather than "different answer".

> And people that who actually work with viruses consider them alive.

I know of two people that work with them (create vaccines) that don't consider them alive. I've honestly never heard anyone else that I know working with them talk about considering them alive or not. Not sure why you'd make such a blanket statement unless you are a virologist.

Curious. In this context, I hang out mostly with marine microbiologists. I do go to talks more broadly, but more research biology than medical. Aside from common use of "dead", the question has only come up twice-ish in many years, and both times it the group discussion was unanimous. Actually, it also came up in a talk earlier this year, again environmental microbiology, around a taxonomy of selective pressures? I fuzzily recall they chose a predicate of "capable of adaptive co-evolution". As you say, it rarely comes up, but I'm sensitized to the topic, and I've not previously seen suggestion of an alternate population of thought. Thanks! I wonder if it varies by field? And yes, even if I was a virologist, a blanket statement, especially in a sample-poor context, is just inviting failure by not being true for some unfamiliar subfield or culture.

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