Eli5: what exactly is a virus and are viruses alive?
In: 130
Basically a protein with self-replication instructions that doesn’t have the tools to actually perform that self replication that finds a cell to latch onto to use the cell’s self replication tools for its own replication.
As for whether you can call them “alive” that’s entirely a gray area. The only aspect of the definition of a living thing that a virus doesn’t fit is that it can’t self replicate, it needs something else to perform its replication for it. It fits every other criteria for a living thing.
Does that one distinction make it technically not considered alive? Sure, technically yeah, but is that one distinction enough to REALLY say it’s actually not alive?
Life is kind of a nebulous thing, and applying that same standard of it not fully fitting the definition would also make sterile people technically not living things, so the answer for that question is kind of a big question mark.
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