Kevbo

I've been doing a little online research on viruses in order to better understand their function and origins. I think they're a particularly good example of the "blurry line" between life and non-life. Considering that the Bible was written way before microorganisms were conceived of, it's not surprising that it has nothing to say about them. It seems like this is a large hole in the biblical literalist worldview, considering that they are left trying to explain away the wrench that viruses and parasites throw into their worldview.

Could someone more acquainted with biology please point out some good resources that deal with the origins of viruses (whether from living organism cells or abiogenesis, or a combination of the two) and arguments that would be good to use with creationists concerning viruses?

Here are some creationist articles that talk about viruses:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/1346.asp

http://www.trueorigin.org/virus.asp

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs/3985.asp

Spaz

Can't they give it up? What pissed me off (although I only skimmed ) was this heading, "MUTATIONS — NO EVOLUTION" wtf is that? Oh well...

Nic Tamzek

Well, the origin of most viruses is AFAIK pretty murky (there may be a few where the origin is fairly clear, I forget). Some could be relicts that go all the way back to pre-cellular life -- parasitism could be expected to evolve almost as soon as exposed nucleotide strands began to replicate. Others might come from isolated bits of biochemical machinery -- e.g., some bacteria transmit plasmids via secretion systems with stalks (where the secretion system may be part of the plasmid), so I've seen it suggested that a broken-off stalk with a plasmid inside is pretty much a virus.

So there's probably no one answer.

I read the trueorigins article, the author can't quite seem to decide if the obvious adaptive changes that viruses undergo are due to accident ("loss of info") or pre-programmed changes ("gain of info"). I was surprised, however, that the author didn't take the obvious route and just blame the "bad" viruses on The Fall.

The origins of *recent* viruses from other viruses is, OTOH, pretty well understood. The recent media on SARS is an example: some of the first things that scientists did were to sequence the SARS genome, do similarity searches to figure out what the virus was closely related to, and then go out and try to find the closest relative of SARS in a nonhuman (I think it is a chinese ferret or something). They've done similar things with AIDS etc. It seems that the most common source of new bad diseases is when a mutant "jumps hosts" from an animal to a human, usually when humans live and/or eat said animals under less than sanitary conditions. Evolutionary studies have obvious implications for public health here.

Google reveals a book on the topic:

Esteban Domingo, Robert Webster and John Holland, eds. Origin and Evolution of Viruses, Academic Press, 1999.

A blurb here:
http://www.panspermia.org/whatsne13.htm
...however the panspermia site is dubious.

NonHomogenized

Ow... my ribs...
note to self: no more reading AIG at work.
puzzled looks from customers = bad.

But, oy, what a hoot!
I didn't even make it to the "trueorigins" page, before giving up.

That first AIG page's argument goes something like this:

-People like to point out that many diseases can't survive outside the host, and that this demonstrates some major problems with the "flood" crap we go on about.
-Ummmm... actually, I don't have a good response for that. I mean, er, let's bullsh... examine the subject.
-Well, the bible says there was a flood, and that's as scientific as I need, so I need to make up^H^H^H^H^H examine possible mechanisms for how pathogens DID survive it.
-Goddidit
-but, if that explanation isn't good enough, here's some others. I'm sure one will convince you. If not, that just means we haven't found it yet.
-Pathogens used to be able to infect anything, and only later "devolved" to only be able to infect specific species (disregarding how implausible it is; viruses are only able to species which are similar enough to be susceptible, eg similar protein coats on cells, etc)
-Pathogens which used to be able to survive on their own "specialized" to only live inside the hosts' body (but... why?)
-viruses "microevolved" to jump species (can't deny this, since we see it happen all the time. Makes me wonder where the cutoff on what they'll admit, no matter how obvious it is)
-of course, virii aren't really alive to begin with, so we don't need to address them, anyhow.
-In fact, since we're hoping you'll swallow that line of reasoning, we'll concede that virii evolve. However, since a virus has never evolved into anything other than a virus, you can't use it to support "molecules-to-man evolution" (whatever the fuck that is. But it sounds to me like they just conceded "macroevolution", since they had to broaden it to "viruses")
-or maybe all those diseases were brought on the ark by carrier organisms. And somehow, the close proximity for 40 days didn't cause EVERYTHING ELSE ON THE ARK to get infected/killed.
-Human lifespans decreased after the flood (all evidence of increasing human lifespans over the centuries to the contrary, but we'll ignore that), so Noah and his family were probably immune to everything, but were symptomless carriers.
-maybe insects carried them on rafts of floating vegetation!
-It took weeks for all the humans to die. Maybe they all got horribly ill, as well.
-and then the pathogens could have lived on in all the corpses! Yeah, that's it!
-and, uh, virii (but I thought they aren't actually alive. how come you keep coming back to them?) could have survived in the dried state, like rabies (and they managed this when it was raining for 40 days and 40 nights how, exactly?!?)
-they could have been flash-frozen, like mammoths! (:banghead: )
-So, uh, although each of these is pure crap, I mean, is insufficient by iteself, if you look at all of them, I'm sure you can pick one that looks good to you (at least, assuming your an apologist, who likes to ignore pesky things like facts and reality).
-Oh, wait, that whole thing about living things becoming more "picky"... that's not through evolution. No, really. You see, "variation within a kind" (whatever that means) is the opposite of what it takes to evolve. You see, for example, chihuahuas can't be used to breed great danes, because they don't have the genetic information anymore. (and if you'll believe that based on blind assertion, there's this bridge in brooklyn I'd like to sell you...)

I'm really glad I wasn't drinking soda while reading that. I don't suppose my manager would be too pleased if he had to get a new monitor and keyboard for this computer...

lpetrich

One difficulty in working out virus origins is that viruses are just plain small, which may make it hard to find origin clues the way one can for larger organisms. Also, some viruses use relatively sloppy replication mechanisms that can obscure their origins by making the amount of genetic drift very large.

But viruses differ in overall features; some have double-stranded DNA, some have single-stranded DNA, some have double-stranded RNA, and some have single-stranded RNA. The latter sort is further subdivided into positive and negative sense RNA, positive meaning direct translation from genome to proteins and negative meaning translation from a complementary strand.

Also, while host switching is common, and may happen between organisms as divergent as insects and plants, it does not seem to happen between domains -- families of viruses exclusively have prokaryote or eukaryote hosts.

This suggest multiple origins. Some may originate in the way that Nic Tamzek suggests -- a self-reproducing piece of DNA or RNA that went free. While others may be highly degenerate cells. The poxviruses are a good candidate; they have double-stranded DNA genomes that are relatively large by virus standards: ~ 200 kbp.

Getting back to SARS, the most likely original host so far is the masked palm civet, Paguma larvata, of Southeast Asia.

Finally, one thing that should help in fighting SARS as opposed to AIDS is that it is more difficult to perceive SARS victims as sinners than AIDS victims.

Happy Wonderer

Nonsense. How many Chinese Christians do you know? I bet most of the victims were Communists, Buddhists or followers of some other cult. And that nice Christian guy in Canada who died going over there to adopt a baby? Obviously it was punishment for associating too closely with cultists.

/fundy

If anyone sees logic like this on boards anywere for real don't tell me...

hw