Unintelligent design - by viruses

[PIT2]

Interesting story i read today:

Unintelligent Design
A monstrous discovery suggests that viruses, long regarded as lowly evolutionary latecomers, may have been the precursors of all life on Earth[/color]

...Now, with the recent discovery of a truly monstrous virus, scientists are again casting about for how best to characterize these spectral life-forms. The new virus, officially known as Mimivirus (because it mimics a bacterium), is a creature "so bizarre," as The London Telegraph described it, "and unlike anything else seen by scientists . . . that . . . it could qualify for a new domain in the tree of life." Indeed, Mimivirus is so much more genetically complex than all previously known viruses, not to mention a number of bacteria, that it seems to call for a dramatic redrawing of the tree of life.

...That represents a radical change in thinking about life's origins: Viruses, long thought to be biology's hitchhikers, turn out to have been biology's formative force. This is striking news, especially at a moment when the basic facts of origins and evolution seem to have fallen under a shroud. In the discussions of intelligent design, one hears a yearning for an old-fashioned creation story, in which some singular, inchoate entity stepped into give rise to complex life-forms—humans in particular. Now the viruses appear to present a creation story of their own: a stirring, topsy-turvy, and decidedly unintelligent design wherein life arose more by reckless accident than original intent, through an accumulation of genetic accounting errors committed by hordes of mindless, microscopic replication machines. Our descent from apes is the least of it. With the discovery of Mimi, scientists are close to ascribing to viruses the last role that anyone would have conceived for them: that of life's prime mover.

http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-06/cover/

But one thing i don't understand: how does this have anything to do with intelligent design or make it any less likely? Could ID proponents not say the same about viruses as they say about life - that they are too complex to have come about by randomness+natural selection?

 

[scott1]

how does this have anything to do with intelligent design

Nothing just somthing get people to read there article.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Interesting story i read today:
But one thing i don't understand: how does this have anything to do with intelligent design or make it any less likely? Could ID proponents not say the same about viruses as they say about life - that they are too complex to have come about by randomness+natural selection?

Viruses are extremely simple chains of DNA and RNA you could probably make a fairly long chain of RNA from base materials.

It doesn't contradict science that's the point.

In my experience intelligent design proponenets will say anything no matter how false or how little it is based on science or anything. Intelligent design is pesudo scientific philosophical claptrap.

If anything this is another nail in the coffin of ID.

 

[PIT2]

Viruses are extremely simple chains of DNA and RNA you could probably make a fairly long chain of RNA from base materials.

The question is whether nature can make such things through mechanistic processes.
Even though it is assumed so, assumptions won't convince ID'ers.
On wikipedia it says:

Some viruses form by self-assembly of protein and nucleic acid molecules. These macromolecules are assembled within host cells from smaller organic compounds. Virus self-assembly has implications for the study of the origin of life. Concerning whether viruses are alive or not, if the requirement for autonomous self-reproduction is abandoned, it can be argued strongly that viruses are indeed alive. Some small viruses are more efficient than most cellular life forms as their ratio of functions to working parts is so high. If viruses are alive then the prospect of creating artificial life is enhanced or at least the standards required to call something artificially alive are reduced.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus#Lifeform_debate

What i gathered from the earlier article is that they still have the chicken/egg question of which came first: life or viruses.

David Prangishvili, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a colleague with Forterre in studying viruses that infect archaea, now thinks that viruses swam in the primordial soup prior to the emergence of cellular life of any kind and only later became dependent on cells. Forterre is less convinced.

"It is difficult for me to imagine," he says. "You need to have some type of closed system to be sure that the different reactants of the metabolism, or different mechanisms, can interact with each other and also have a kind of Darwinian evolution. You need to have individuals. I think there was an RNA world prior to the DNA world, when you had a lot of RNA cells. Maybe viruses originated at the time of the RNA cell. You need to have a cell to even obtain a virus."
http://www.discover.com/issues/mar-06/cover/?page=2

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Interesting to be honest I don't think making life in front of their eyes would convince Id'ers but that's beside the point

 

[Mk]

I've been thinking viruses were organism number one for a while.

 

[Phobos]

I suppose the article's implication is "look, here's another transitional form" (something creationists say there are none of).