I’ll try to keep this short.
For years, viruses have both fascinated and completely terrified me. I understand that bacteria are little itty bitty simple organisms. Makes sense, like when you learn about your own cells in biology class.
But a virus? From what I’ve read, they aren’t alive. They just go around hoping to get inside of you so they can hijack your cells, cause mayhem and potentially kill the host that’s keeping its cycle going.
Where did they come from? How can they not have a full life cycle on their own? Seemingly no purpose, but still exist. How did they start out? I know no life form has a ‘true purpose’ because we’re all lucky to just be here but, there are pollinators, predators to keep prey numbers in check. Organisms that work together to both benefit. Then there are mindless viruses that just exist and if you inhale them, they mess you up. Why?
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Viruses are just (highly specialized) genetic code. *Any* genetic code, dropped in the appropriate chemical soup, will replicate. We do this all the time in DNA test labs, you don’t need a living cell to do it, it’s just (highly specialized) chemistry.
Viruses are what happens when some random piece of genetic code wrapped in protein gets mutated just right to break in and instruct other cells to keep making copies.
This is happening *constantly*, and the vast majority of mutations result in a “dead” (can’t infect anything) or no meaningful difference, but once in a while it causes some meaningful change…like more infectious or capable of breaking into new cells, etc. The success rate of this is really really low but it’s happening so often than you get meaningful evolution among viruses at fairly high speed.
The viruses we encounter are just the random code bits that survived this evolutionary filter. Evolution does *not* require that you be alive, just that you can replicate, pass on traits, some way to mutate, and those traits influence how likely you are to replicate. Viruses meet all those criteria.
Viruses have no point. They’re just an inevitable byproduct of how our genetic chemistry works.
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