Eli5-If a virus isn’t technically alive, I would assume it doesn’t have instinct. Where does it get its instructions/drive to know to infect host cells and multiply?
In: 7067
The thing about a virus is that ***all it is***… is *a set of instructions*. Crucially: it’s not alive because it doesn’t contain the instructions needed, to replicate itself.
Let’s step back, though: imagine a town full of book factories. *Millions* of factories. These factories take wood, but for everything else that’s needed to make the book, the factory does the work: it turns the wood into paper, it turns some of the wood into ink, it prints the words onto the pages, binds the pages up, makes some cardboard for the books to be shipped in, and then ships the books out at as packages to wherever the orders come from.
Let’s say one day, the head of a factory receives a package with a book in it. And the book says: “Surprise! You have been cursed by the ghost of Christmas future! Follow the instructions below to send a copy of this package to 10 other factories in this town, or you will suffer a horrible fate!”
The factory head, maybe because he is not too bright, or maybe because he thinks the joke is hilarious, builds ten copies of the package and sends them to the ten factories on his street. Soon everybody in town is sending each other joke packages!
Here’s the crucial thing: is the package alive? Absolutely not!
* The package didn’t build itself.
* The package didn’t mail itself.
* The package didn’t decide whether it gets built.
* The package doesn’t contain the instructions needed to build a package factory.
* The package doesn’t contain the instructions needed to grow or harvest any wood.
* The package doesn’t even contain the instructions needed to make its own paper.
That’s what viruses are like. I absolutely love the fact that we call chain letters and chain emails and shit “viral”, because they’re a great demonstration of just why viruses aren’t alive: they’re not alive *because* they can’t do anything for themselves.
Living cells are the ones that bring the viruses inside, just like how it takes a deliveryman to deliver a package. Living cells are the only places where the “instructions” contained in a virus can be followed; the DNA inside of a virus doesn’t do anything if it’s just outside in the rest of the world.
Viruses are not a self-contained nucleus of reproductive activity. They’re only a set of instructions that hijacks other reproductive machinery. That machinery, in order to replicate itself, has to have its own self-contained feedback loop of reproductive activity. That’s what makes viruses not alive.
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