I think the title explains itself.
Thanks for the help!
EDIT: I know they are not alive, but can be “de-activated”, my bad for expressing myself in a bad way.
In: Biology
A virus is not dead, it’s simply not alive. The same way a rock is not dead, it’s just not alive. Viruses aren’t living things because they don’t meet the criteria for life. They’re just a small packet of DNA or RNA surrounded by a membrane. They can’t reproduce on their own. They don’t grow or use energy. They don’t eat and they don’t produce waste. They’re more like biological machines than living organisms.
Bacteria, on the other hand, are living organisms. They might be simple and small, but they use energy (which means they need food to survive), produce waste, and reproduce on their own. Those are all things they share in common with more complex life, while viruses lack these things.
It’s not considered “dead”. It’s considered “non-living.”
It’s based on how science defines life. A virus cannot replicate on its own. It needs a host to survive and replicate.
Not super clear. Concepts such as life and death were proposed and used when people wanted to differentiate a dog from a stone but ~~wince~~ since more knowledge has been gathered, the distinctions are not that clear cut.
A concept of life that was used in biology was that something was alive if it could interact with its medium, grow and replicate by itself.
The problem with viruses is that they cannot reproduce by themselves, they need a host to infect and make the host produce more viruses, therefore they don’t comply with the definition.
Tricky question cause their are two answers. One: viruses aren’t considered dead in the context you are asking. They are simply not considered alive. There is such thing as a “dead virus” but usually the term is “inactive” not “dead.” The reason they are usually not considered alive is that they don’t meet one of the definitions of being alive: being able to self reproduce. Viruses *require* another organism to make more copies, so by definition, it isn’t alive. The second reason this is tricky, is that many scientists do consider them alive. They have enough of the characteristics of a living thing that many consider them alive. You have chosen to ask one of the more interesting philosophical questions that scientists struggle to find a solid answer for.
It’s the lack of metabolism that does it. Viruses just don’t do anything. No chemical reactions are taking place, no gene activity, no nothing. They can’t breath, they can’t eat and they can’t repair themselves. They are just complicated microscopic ‘rocks’.
You could argue they come alive when they infect something. The important thing is that they belong to the realm of biology, so the distinction between living and non-living doesn’t really mean much.
Latest Answers