I've been dealing with this question since I learned about virus in college, now I´ve had really long discussions with my co-workers and friends...Any thoughts?
Dear Ana,
According to Wikipedia, viruses are
"non-living particles with some chemical characteristics similar to those of life. As such, they do not fit neatly into the established biological classification system in place for cellular organisms."
So one option is to accept the above viewpoint, and say simply that they, along with subviral agents (Viroids, Satellites, Prions etc) are indeed "non-living".
Alternatively, one might choose to consider that life is not a binary classification (living vs non-living), but perhaps it can be considered as a sequence of conditions ranging from intelligent life, through single-celled life, via such intermediate conditions as viruses and prions to biochemical molecules, and finally inert matter.
Indeed, it might even prove useful at some point to consider the different life-related characteristics as points in a multidimensional space that allows all the relevant characteristics to be considered together, and perhaps a metric could assign a degree of life to various points in such a space.
My own interest in this question involves the relationship of various forms of life to information and decision making, which in a sense even simple life-forms engage in.
But at what point does a - probably bounded - collection of chemicals start to display emergent properties that cannot be explained purely by physico-chemical interactions?
Hoping this helps - Paul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_classification
That's a great point ofview, though the "intelligence" part leads to another discussion, since bacteria are single cell life but they do communicate and although is more a chemical language, it could also be interpretated like intelligence, since they solve problems.
Thanks for your opinion!!
I'll read more about those biological "living" emergent properties
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