New viruslike entities found in human gut microbes
science.org
science.org
It’s hard to see the trillions of other planets in the known universe along with its age and apparently limited chemistry and not imagine how similar RNAs should’ve have popped up over and over again.
Given a bath of amino acids you can easily use RNA to bootstrap a whole self-replicating system, which is probably what happened by accident at some point.
>In the early 20th century, plant pathologists came across viroids
>some of the obelisk sequences encoded proteins involved in RNA replication, making them more complex than standard viroids
I don't mean to interrupt your narrative but you seem to be getting information from other sources and I was wondering what they are.
> Scientists still debate whether viruses are alive—they can’t replicate independent of a host cell’s molecules—but there are even simpler “creatures.”
We have varies "definition" and "categorization" saying virus is not "alive".. you can see many biologist saying this definition does not capture the essence and need changes... There are published paper for that every few other years.
Look like this is what the "AI is sentient" thing going... We will get a textbook definition for sentient AI, but nothing could end that debate.
The distinctions in taxonomy should be reflected by the language, and we should very much not try to conform our taxonomy to our existing terms… beyond, say, shorthand.
we should very much not try to conform our taxonomy to our existing terms
I think the success of transformer-derived LLMs suggests that Wittgenstein was more correct about contextual “family resemblances” than the “pointing at things” school of language philosophy.
I'm a bit ignorant of the actual math/logic for modern LLMs (I took Andrew Ng's course on machine learning, but that just gets you to basic neural network architecture).
I'm also confused as to why you would put Wittgenstein in opposition to the concept of language as "pointing at things," as I would put him very much in that school. I'm a bit rusty, but I've been through the Philosophical Investigations a couple times, and I'm almost certain he's opposed to platonic forms.
There can be a messy continuum between is and is not. Things can match a definition strongly by some measures but miss some that are critical to how other things meet the definition. At best, a definition is a constellation of semi-related characteristic where some organism meet some subset and other meet another subset, but there isn’t a 100% match and may not even be an overlap.
Exactly--concepts like "life" were invented long before we had an inkling of what viruses were...is it surprising that it's not a perfect abstraction for what we find in reality?
My work in computational ontology led me to believe people are fast to come to a conceptual joint agreement in a given model when the outcome is not consequential, but find it nearly impossible to settle when there are strong implications attached to a labeling.
Language only works between people that ultimatly want to agree.
Organizing everything in the world into neat boxes feels so early 20th century to me. Back when we still thought that human reasoning can be applied to achieve a complete understanding of the world and everything in it. Putting things into boxes is a coping mechanism for the feeling of chaos; people do it because it makes them feel good, not because it actually reflects how things are.
Well, it's tricky because labelling is so useful (oftentimes crucial for communication purposes), but we would be hamstringing ourselves if we either a. held off on labeling things with fuzzy boundaries altogether or b. refused to entertain possibilities with strong implications because a labelled phenomenon has fuzzy boundaries.
Best to remember that labels are useful but with very important limitations. Ultimately, when we get out to the edge of our understanding the boundaries will always be fuzzy, at least until a breakthrough (and sometimes long after). Whenever you are at a boundary, continually remind yourself that the label is less important than communication and exploration of what actually appears to be going on.
Are viruses alive? This is a very interesting question to try and answer from different angles, but arriving on a definitive "yes or no" here is not at all the most important thing about viruses to be worrying about.
There's a line of thought that metabolism is the defining feature of biological life, and viruses do not have any metabolic activity of their own. This is essentially the only real distinguishing characteristic that holds true between viruses and organisms.
Once a virus has a host cell, however, it uses metabolic events to do its thing. That use of those events to drive its own reproduction is very life-like, and is very unlike a prion. In terms of behavior, it really is more like life than not. It uses metabolism, even if it doesn't innately perform glycolysis like everything else.
The "are viruses alive" is really more a medical philosophy question than a practical one.
Just because a virus interacts with a metabolism doesn't mean it's closer to having one of its own. That's like saying humans use gasoline combustion for our biology because we drive cars instead of walking sometimes.
You're not wrong that whether viruses are alive is not a very practical question, but none of the rest of your post meaningfully addresses it either way.
We are quite lucky that nothing like that targets humans so effectively.
Anyway, fun fact, the prion that causes scrapie is extremely similar to the ones that cause mad cow disease (transmissible to humans) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (human disease). So yes, we're very, very lucky, so far. Sleep tight.
It has a ghastly origin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
(I will upvote you now.)
I imagine you are speaking more in terms of molecular biology, but if we zoom out into evolutionary biology this is not such an unreasonable statement if we are talking in terms of the extended phenotype.
Especially as we get closer to a robust hypothesis that humans lack free will on a biochemical level, it really could be that our genes making use of gasoline, because the "we" that we like to think of as making use of it through intellect and choice is more a hallucination (perhaps useful in some way, perhaps mere side effect) than a biological reality.
Humans using petroleum isn't necessarily all that different from how a parasite modifies host behavior as an essential part of its lifecycle, or how a beaver builds a dam to have a much more survivable environment.
Is the game of life, life?
Scientists "discuss" the boundary between alive and not, which is an interesting question because it doesn't have a super clear and obvious answer. It becomes more a question of semantics and ontology than anything else.
What's really happening is that the words "alive" and "not alive" have outlived their usefulness: we need to think about things differently, and use better words, to fully capture how the world works. That's the discussion, and yes it's similar to what's happening with words like intelligence and consciousness in relation to AI.
Part of the breakdown here is recognizing independent life requiring only a nutrient and energy source, and various consortia (e.g. can you say that a mitochondrion is alive without the host cell, and vice versa).
Basically, as mentioned by another commenter, the fact that "life" started out as a Platonic ideal that's being sussed out.
I'd say just change it to an adjective entirely and don't bother with a categorical noun.
Oh yeah, it could. If AI is textbook-defined technically “sentient” then that is perfectly enough to put an end to unethical abuses of sentient beings. (Imagine what that will do to the industry.)
It doesn’t matter if people still debate it. People still debate race supremacism, slavery, etc., that doesn’t mean a single thing as far as law is concerned.
* Has anyone experimentally demonstrated that these RNA sequences actually form circles?
* Is it possible that these are the result of some reaction in the transcription process? (My understanding of RNA transcription is that we sequentially dump some enzymes into a petri dish, so it seems plausible that we could generate novel DNA/RNA not present in the source.)
* Is it possible these are actually ubiquitous, exist in every cell, but we don't have any reliable way to detect them?
Even if this was plausible, it wouldn't be there at a high enough copy level when using a DNA-dependent RNA polymerase. Let's say the RNA polymerase goes haywire and creates a random string of RNA. Well, you'd just get one exact copy of that string, it'd be unable to use it as a template to duplicate the string, since it requires a DNA template, not an RNA one. A single copy wouldn't be detectable above the noise, and so wouldn't show up in any datasets. (or would be discarded if it did, as noise).
>Is it possible these are actually ubiquitous, exist in every cell, but we don't have any reliable way to detect them?
There is so much more to the RNA world, especially the RNA virus world, than we realize, because RNA is so hard to work with. Humans secrete enzymes that degrade, and those enzymes are extremely durable and wind up everywhere. Also, RNA is generally not good for DNA processing, so lots of DNA prep kits degrade the RNA intentionally. So the overwhelming majority of nucleic acid work is done with just DNA, and RNA viruses are a huge blind spot. That's not to say no one is doing RNA work, just far fewer.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/01/epstein-barr-...
It was originally used to prevent mold on furniture. The Germans notices that treated psoriasis when it was applied topically. After which the swiss(Fumapharm) was noticed that people who took it for psoriasis and had MS, had fewer MS symptoms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_fumarate
==== https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36641891 Dimethyl fumarate ameliorates fungal keratitis by limiting fungal growth and inhibiting pyroptosis
We don’t know.
My brain went the same place as GP but without the anecdote. So I suspect did the people who greyed out your reply before I got here.
And of course, even if there wasn't an explicit reference to that question, wondering how those new entities might affect our health is 100% compatible with the article.
We have no idea what these do. What if they could cause MS? Then drugs could kill these things and prevent MS.
Now that we know some cancers are caused by viruses, we've created vaccines to stop the viruses and the cancer.
A large part of the viruses (if not all) appears to have an ancestor that was significantly further in the past than the common ancestor of all present cellular life forms, so they are much more distantly related to us than any bacteria.
While a part of the viral genomes has this distinct origin, many viruses have combined with various pieces of nucleic acids extracted from their hosts, so these can be considered hybrids that include fragments of DNA or RNA of various origins, possibly even human DNA for some.