Subduction Zone
Veteran Member
On whether or not viruses are life there is still some debate. If one demands that the ability to metabolize is needed to be life they are not a form of life. But they have several other traits of life..But lots of non-living things can reproduce themselves, there are even self-reproducing molecules.
Name one feature of living things that viruses have.
No, they can't reproduce themselves. Evidently you don't know much about viruses.
Viruses are software. They're no different from a computer code instructing the computer to print the code sequence. Is the code "reproducing itself," or are the computer and printer reproducing it?
Viruses, as I said before, are just snippets of code. If the sequence gets into an actual, living cell, the cell will read it just as it does its own code, but the viral code is an instruction to copy itself, in effect, it hijacks the cell's machinery and causes it to print endless copies of the viral code -- and the viral code is the virus.
A living cell is making the viruses, not the viruses themselves.
A printer can spew out endless sheets of paper with "print this code" on them, but the text: "print this code," is not a living thing.
It doesn't "find a need to reproduce itself" or crave anything. You're adducing intentionality where none is necessary. It's an automatic, physical or chemical reaction, like crystal growth or gravitational accretion.
We see examples of things reproducing themselves because only things that could replicate left any specimens of themselves for us to find. This is not evidence of intent.
Of course there are many borders in evolution that are "fuzzy". When a population is one species and when it is another clearly has no sharp line. When a complex molecule and associated structures is life and when it is not is all very fuzzy. The theory essentially predicts this. Creationism, not so much.