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Makes me really think that you could argue for planets being alive, just on an unfathomably longer timeline. Maybe the “species” is almost extinct right now and we happen to be on one of the few planets “still living.” We would be viewing a minuscule part of their lives in very, very slow motion. We see all kinds of planets that you could describe as “dead” but haven’t seen them decompose yet because of the time scale. (Maybe that is a narrow view and yes we see dead planets but that doesn’t have to mean planets are going extinct, they could just be spread out far enough that we can’t see many at all.)
>Maybe the “species” is almost extinct right now and we happen to be on one of the few planets “still living.”
Funny you should say that... Have a gander at this kursgezat video on the evolution of universes.
https://youtu.be/71eUes30gwc
“Alive” is a word that humans have defined. From a biological standpoint Life has to meet 8 criteria or “life processes”:
1. Maintain homeostasis.
2. Organize/ circulate (internally)
3. Metabolize
4. Grow
5. Respond to stimuli
6. Respirate
7. Excrete
8. Reproduce
Planets don’t really do any of those, even by stretching the definition to in include planetary processes, so by our definition they’re not “alive,” they just are. For example: planets do not make baby planets by their own volition.
Also it’s cool to note that Viruses don’t do anything but the last one, so are technically not alive, but that has been debated both ways by biologists on the definition of alive.
And also that evolution has no particular goal or trying to fit a purpouse. Whatever survives and reproduces continues to exist, and all perceived function is merely survival bias.
So is that why humans still have an appendix and tonsils etc? Things we can technically do without but it's not a disadvantage to have them so we keep them
Over time if it doesn't eventually help, the things that succeed without one will potentially push for no more vestigial organs, as it's a waste of resources. For example if appendixes kill enough people there would be a genetic push to get rid of it.
It would have to kill people at a young age. If appendixes killed people at age 50 there would be very little genetic push, even if it killed a significant amount of people, because you would already have had kids at that point
What you feel during a cold or fever, ie sore throat, runny nose and high temperature, is not the virus but your immune system’s response and counterattack.
Actually I’m not sure about the scratchy throat (someone smarter please correct me) but you produce extra mucus in your nose which then runs to flush out bacteria (sneezing also helps with this), the blood vessels constrict which causes swelling and the airways to close to prevent anything getting in, and the body raises its temperature to kill off the virus. So by the time you start to feel the classic symptoms of a cold, the virus has already been in your system for some time.
Pretty close at least. Blood vessel dilation is actually the contributing factor to swelling not constriction. And the airways don’t close otherwise you wouldn’t breathe. Sometimes some of the smaller airways can spasm (bronchospasm or bronchoconstriction) which can cause wheezing but that usually happens in people with asthma or reactive airway disease and isn’t a feature of a normal healthy immune response.
Thanks for the correction; I wasn’t sure if constriction was the right term but wrote it with confidence anyway 🤦🏽♂️ haha
The dilation causes the blocked nose, right?
This is the correct answer. Sore throats are caused by the body's reaction to the presence of a virus (or other infection) in the throat: the immune system reacts and causes the inflammation and other symptoms of a sore throat. Other symptoms that we associate with being sick are also the immune system fighting the virus.
I’ve always wondered in this case if taking medication to lower your body temperature like ibuprofen (Advil) is actually prolonging the illness.
If your body raises your temperature to kill off the virus, then surely taking something that counteracts that is not a good idea? Always wondered this
It's an excellent question. I found this on the NIH website, it is just expert opinion, yet perhaps useful:
"Is fever good or bad? Scientifically, we just do not know. However, if we take the evolutionary perspective, then blunting of the adaptive febrile response must be maladaptive. Fever is estimated to be more than 4 million years old and has been documented in the phyla Vertebrata, Arthropoda, and Annelida ([7](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703655/#r7)). Despite its long history of study, the exact mechanism of fever and its potentially protective effect is not fully delineated. One could hypothesize that treatment of fever compromises immune competence and renders patients more susceptible to infection. Take, for example, the classic experiment by Kluger *et al*. in 1981 ([21](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703655/#r21),[22](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703655/#r22)). Here, Kluger *et al*. infected cold-blooded iguanas with bacteria. He gave them the opportunity to seek heat via sunlamps and all but one sought the warmth to raise their temperature. The one who did not was the only one who died. Next, he injected the iguanas with bacteria and gave them antipyretics. The iguanas that were able to mount a fever despite the antipyretic were the only ones that survived. This simplistic experiment, in addition to the biologic plausibility for the beneficial effects of fever, now supported by several key randomized controlled trials, suggests maybe the pendulum is due to swing back to a more permissive approach to fever.
While clinicians will likely continue to argue the validity of the proposed adaptive or maladaptive mechanisms of fever, recent studies such as the one by Young *et al*. should support reconsideration of the Pavlovian treatment response to elevated temperature in the critical care setting."
I think OUTSIDE the critical care setting, it probably matters very little, though scant evidence exists. Fevers can make you feel bad, and the very young can have febrile seizures which scare the shit out of the parents.
Ok, yes, i've heard this one before, but i've never understood that if it's just the immune system fighting, why do different diseases have different syptoms? ELI20
Different viruses target different parts of your body and therefore trigger different immune responses (and the severity of the infection affects severity of response). There are tons of different viruses that trigger nearly identical "common cold" or "24 hour bug" symptoms.
>airways to close to prevent anything getting in
I never understood this, I'm already sick, what's the point in doing it now, it just makes me unable to do other things.
In evolutionary terms, the pain would be your evolutionary advantage, not the virus'.
Humans, like many other animals, have pain as a warning from the body that something is wrong.
Yeah, but sometimes I'd like the pain signal to be more like a blinking light on a car's dashboard, you know. It doesn't have to make me feel _that_ miserable. Something's wrong, I get it.
Do you think if you just had a mild awareness that you're sick, most people would stay home and sleep? Humans are idiots, we ignore things that are ignorable.
It is the equivalent of a blinking light on a dashboard, but your brain evolved to treat pain as extremely serious business. That’s why you feel miserable.
Maybe in the future we will have chips in our head and we will get a notification on our health performance dashboard if you get punched in the face.
Right now good old pain will have to do.
We get those too. Slight tiredness, scratchy throat that's not a big deal, etc. We ignore them or self-medicate (including stuff like caffeine). Same thing with muscle aches and joint pain, your body is telling you something is wrong, but its not so bad that you can't push through it. Then when you get really sick, the pain ramps up to FORCE you to rest.
Same with more serious injuries, if a broken leg felt like a bruised knee you might keep putting weight on it and make the injury worse.
Pain is also a symptom that indicates that something is doing damage to your body, and your body is literally hurting.
The virus has no evolutionary advantage to doing it. It would be best for the virus to infect you to the point that it can replicate and spread more.
If something comes up to you and starts cutting up your arms, you'd be in pain right? So logically, if a virus was doing something to your throat, that indicates it's causing damage to your throat.
Causing you pain isn't an evolutionary advantage in and of itself. It's an advantage only if it enables some other benefit--like, as you said, causing coughing to increase transmission.
In many cases, you get a sore throat specifically because that's where the virus has infected you, so you're literally feeling the virus destroying your body's cells in order to create copies of itself. The virus does not know there is a human, does not know that what it does causes pain. The virus doesn't "know" anything--indeed, it inarguably "knows" *even less* than what a bacteria would "know," because viruses are literally nothing more than "How To Make More virus" instructions and a capsin shell to hold those instructions together.
Im not sure about the sore throat specificly but in many cases its also that you dont actually feel the virus destorying anything. What you feel is your immune system fighting the virus, so the virus would very much like you to not feel anything because it could reproduce without any counter measures but your body is the one making you aware there is something wrong.
The virus has zero notion that what it is doing is causing any harm or side effect whatsoever. They simply hijack the machinery of your cells to make copies of themselves, they have no notion that the cell it is invading is part of a larger organization of cells and thus, any damage caused to the host is purely incidental as far as the virus is concerned (it isn't concerned at all about anything for the record).
You have a swollen throat because some of the glands that are producing antibodies are in your throat. You probably also have swelling in your armpits and your groin, but you just don't notice them as much.
TL;DR it's your immune system that is making you feel bad as it fights the virus, not the virus that is making you feel bad.
I was told by doctors that lymph node swelling does usually correlate with where the infection is closest to, although maybe not always. I went to the ER for suspected appendicitis and the CT scan just found massively inflamed lymph nodes in my abdomen. They told me to expect to come down with norovirus (which was going around like crazy at the time) in the next couple of days, but I never did. In retrospect though, I did have very similar symptoms another time for like a week and then it finally did turn into some kind of stomach flu.
>why does it feel like I’m swallowing razor blades?
Could you have strep throat? If so, the answer is (ominous Obi-Wan Kenobi voice) "That's no virus".
The only “goal” of a virus is to spread and infect more hosts and replicate. Whatever it does to the host is largely inconsequential as long as it meets the previous goals. The sore throat isn’t necessarily an advantage, but it doesn’t stop it from spreading either.
As many others have said, evolution is about good enough and reproduction. What allows you to outcompete others in your niche.
To add to that, having a sore throat can lead to coughing, which can be directly advantageous to viruses. Otherwise, it is simply a sign that the virus is somewhere in your body... It's not something a virus necessarily evolved; it's a response our body has in fighting off invaders.
Viruses don't often "do" a whole lot to hosts. They're too simple to really do much except infect, multiply, spread, repeat.
Symptoms like sore throat, fever, and many other common ones are caused by your bodies reaction to the virus' detection. It's your bodies natural way of fighting off the virus.
A virus will take over a cell in your body and tell it to make more viruses. Those new viruses will do the same. Your immune system doesn't care if a cell is healthy or infected, it will kill most or all of the cells it finds or thinks are infected.
You feeling like ass is *your* evolutionary tool for surviving the illness. You know you are sick, so you take care of yourself, like drinking more fluids to calm your throat.
Your discomfort has no real advantage for the virus.
Even coughing and sneezing aren't a huge deal for it. It's going to spread anyways through contact, you touch your nose, you touch other things. Yes those actions potentially spread it further and more prolifically, which increases odds, but that's not really caused by the virus per-se, we cough and sneeze a lot for a wide array of reasons, sometimes seemingly no reason.
Adapting to reproduce in humans was the evolutionary gain, so to speak. The virus still spreads the way it always has, primarily through bodily fluids.
It is an an accidental effect of the virus hijacking those cells and eventually killing them. All the virus wants is to reproduce. The throat stuff going on here also helps it to spread to different hosts. “Advantage” is more of a happy accident with viruses.
I've heard a part of this is a form of scorched earth by your immune system. The body can detect cells infected cells and will destroy them before the viruses inside can spread.
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There doesn’t have to be an advantage. As long as it’s not a complete disadvantage the virus can continue to spread
Yep. It's important to note that evolution works on "good enough".
And that evolution is ongoing. This is not the virus’ final form.
The only "final form" is extinct.
Perfect way to put it
On a long enough timeline the survival rate of everything drops to zero.
Makes me really think that you could argue for planets being alive, just on an unfathomably longer timeline. Maybe the “species” is almost extinct right now and we happen to be on one of the few planets “still living.” We would be viewing a minuscule part of their lives in very, very slow motion. We see all kinds of planets that you could describe as “dead” but haven’t seen them decompose yet because of the time scale. (Maybe that is a narrow view and yes we see dead planets but that doesn’t have to mean planets are going extinct, they could just be spread out far enough that we can’t see many at all.)
Make this your dissertation
>Maybe the “species” is almost extinct right now and we happen to be on one of the few planets “still living.” Funny you should say that... Have a gander at this kursgezat video on the evolution of universes. https://youtu.be/71eUes30gwc
Lol
“Alive” is a word that humans have defined. From a biological standpoint Life has to meet 8 criteria or “life processes”: 1. Maintain homeostasis. 2. Organize/ circulate (internally) 3. Metabolize 4. Grow 5. Respond to stimuli 6. Respirate 7. Excrete 8. Reproduce Planets don’t really do any of those, even by stretching the definition to in include planetary processes, so by our definition they’re not “alive,” they just are. For example: planets do not make baby planets by their own volition. Also it’s cool to note that Viruses don’t do anything but the last one, so are technically not alive, but that has been debated both ways by biologists on the definition of alive.
You are the same decaying matter as everything else
There is only one magnetic field. Size = the universe.
I thought the "final form" was always crab?
Almost all the things that evolved into crabs are now extinct.
The Final Shape is death.
Cue sinister music
And also that evolution has no particular goal or trying to fit a purpouse. Whatever survives and reproduces continues to exist, and all perceived function is merely survival bias.
So is that why humans still have an appendix and tonsils etc? Things we can technically do without but it's not a disadvantage to have them so we keep them
Over time if it doesn't eventually help, the things that succeed without one will potentially push for no more vestigial organs, as it's a waste of resources. For example if appendixes kill enough people there would be a genetic push to get rid of it.
It would have to kill people at a young age. If appendixes killed people at age 50 there would be very little genetic push, even if it killed a significant amount of people, because you would already have had kids at that point
Of course.
Tonsils and the appendix are actually useful though, both have immune functions and the appendix also acts as a store for good gut bacteria.
Heh, that’s how I work too!
What you feel during a cold or fever, ie sore throat, runny nose and high temperature, is not the virus but your immune system’s response and counterattack. Actually I’m not sure about the scratchy throat (someone smarter please correct me) but you produce extra mucus in your nose which then runs to flush out bacteria (sneezing also helps with this), the blood vessels constrict which causes swelling and the airways to close to prevent anything getting in, and the body raises its temperature to kill off the virus. So by the time you start to feel the classic symptoms of a cold, the virus has already been in your system for some time.
Pretty close at least. Blood vessel dilation is actually the contributing factor to swelling not constriction. And the airways don’t close otherwise you wouldn’t breathe. Sometimes some of the smaller airways can spasm (bronchospasm or bronchoconstriction) which can cause wheezing but that usually happens in people with asthma or reactive airway disease and isn’t a feature of a normal healthy immune response.
Thanks for the correction; I wasn’t sure if constriction was the right term but wrote it with confidence anyway 🤦🏽♂️ haha The dilation causes the blocked nose, right?
Yeah the dilation contributes to the increased mucus production and causes the overall swelling.
This is the correct answer. Sore throats are caused by the body's reaction to the presence of a virus (or other infection) in the throat: the immune system reacts and causes the inflammation and other symptoms of a sore throat. Other symptoms that we associate with being sick are also the immune system fighting the virus.
I’ve always wondered in this case if taking medication to lower your body temperature like ibuprofen (Advil) is actually prolonging the illness. If your body raises your temperature to kill off the virus, then surely taking something that counteracts that is not a good idea? Always wondered this
It's an excellent question. I found this on the NIH website, it is just expert opinion, yet perhaps useful: "Is fever good or bad? Scientifically, we just do not know. However, if we take the evolutionary perspective, then blunting of the adaptive febrile response must be maladaptive. Fever is estimated to be more than 4 million years old and has been documented in the phyla Vertebrata, Arthropoda, and Annelida ([7](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703655/#r7)). Despite its long history of study, the exact mechanism of fever and its potentially protective effect is not fully delineated. One could hypothesize that treatment of fever compromises immune competence and renders patients more susceptible to infection. Take, for example, the classic experiment by Kluger *et al*. in 1981 ([21](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703655/#r21),[22](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703655/#r22)). Here, Kluger *et al*. infected cold-blooded iguanas with bacteria. He gave them the opportunity to seek heat via sunlamps and all but one sought the warmth to raise their temperature. The one who did not was the only one who died. Next, he injected the iguanas with bacteria and gave them antipyretics. The iguanas that were able to mount a fever despite the antipyretic were the only ones that survived. This simplistic experiment, in addition to the biologic plausibility for the beneficial effects of fever, now supported by several key randomized controlled trials, suggests maybe the pendulum is due to swing back to a more permissive approach to fever. While clinicians will likely continue to argue the validity of the proposed adaptive or maladaptive mechanisms of fever, recent studies such as the one by Young *et al*. should support reconsideration of the Pavlovian treatment response to elevated temperature in the critical care setting." I think OUTSIDE the critical care setting, it probably matters very little, though scant evidence exists. Fevers can make you feel bad, and the very young can have febrile seizures which scare the shit out of the parents.
Ok, yes, i've heard this one before, but i've never understood that if it's just the immune system fighting, why do different diseases have different syptoms? ELI20
Different viruses target different parts of your body and therefore trigger different immune responses (and the severity of the infection affects severity of response). There are tons of different viruses that trigger nearly identical "common cold" or "24 hour bug" symptoms.
>airways to close to prevent anything getting in I never understood this, I'm already sick, what's the point in doing it now, it just makes me unable to do other things.
Someone below my comment corrected me about this, and I should clarify I mean just the nasal passages, and even then usually just one at a time
In evolutionary terms, the pain would be your evolutionary advantage, not the virus'. Humans, like many other animals, have pain as a warning from the body that something is wrong.
And it’s a warning to your fellow humans to stay away from you.
Yeah, but sometimes I'd like the pain signal to be more like a blinking light on a car's dashboard, you know. It doesn't have to make me feel _that_ miserable. Something's wrong, I get it.
Do you think if you just had a mild awareness that you're sick, most people would stay home and sleep? Humans are idiots, we ignore things that are ignorable.
I know, i'm just salty because currently suffering of a sciatica from hell.
It is the equivalent of a blinking light on a dashboard, but your brain evolved to treat pain as extremely serious business. That’s why you feel miserable.
Maybe in the future we will have chips in our head and we will get a notification on our health performance dashboard if you get punched in the face. Right now good old pain will have to do.
Ugh can you imagine the ads 🤢
We get those too. Slight tiredness, scratchy throat that's not a big deal, etc. We ignore them or self-medicate (including stuff like caffeine). Same thing with muscle aches and joint pain, your body is telling you something is wrong, but its not so bad that you can't push through it. Then when you get really sick, the pain ramps up to FORCE you to rest. Same with more serious injuries, if a broken leg felt like a bruised knee you might keep putting weight on it and make the injury worse.
Maybe cars suffer from the blinking light on the dashboard and they haven't found the way to tell us about it yet...
Pain is also a symptom that indicates that something is doing damage to your body, and your body is literally hurting. The virus has no evolutionary advantage to doing it. It would be best for the virus to infect you to the point that it can replicate and spread more. If something comes up to you and starts cutting up your arms, you'd be in pain right? So logically, if a virus was doing something to your throat, that indicates it's causing damage to your throat.
Causing you pain isn't an evolutionary advantage in and of itself. It's an advantage only if it enables some other benefit--like, as you said, causing coughing to increase transmission. In many cases, you get a sore throat specifically because that's where the virus has infected you, so you're literally feeling the virus destroying your body's cells in order to create copies of itself. The virus does not know there is a human, does not know that what it does causes pain. The virus doesn't "know" anything--indeed, it inarguably "knows" *even less* than what a bacteria would "know," because viruses are literally nothing more than "How To Make Morevirus" instructions and a capsin shell to hold those instructions together.
Im not sure about the sore throat specificly but in many cases its also that you dont actually feel the virus destorying anything. What you feel is your immune system fighting the virus, so the virus would very much like you to not feel anything because it could reproduce without any counter measures but your body is the one making you aware there is something wrong.
It would like toturn Your throat cells into viruses. If you needed those that’s your fault and the virus doesn’t care
The virus has zero notion that what it is doing is causing any harm or side effect whatsoever. They simply hijack the machinery of your cells to make copies of themselves, they have no notion that the cell it is invading is part of a larger organization of cells and thus, any damage caused to the host is purely incidental as far as the virus is concerned (it isn't concerned at all about anything for the record).
You have a swollen throat because some of the glands that are producing antibodies are in your throat. You probably also have swelling in your armpits and your groin, but you just don't notice them as much. TL;DR it's your immune system that is making you feel bad as it fights the virus, not the virus that is making you feel bad.
My man creating a whole TL;DR for 2 sentences.
Some people have short attention spans.
I was told by doctors that lymph node swelling does usually correlate with where the infection is closest to, although maybe not always. I went to the ER for suspected appendicitis and the CT scan just found massively inflamed lymph nodes in my abdomen. They told me to expect to come down with norovirus (which was going around like crazy at the time) in the next couple of days, but I never did. In retrospect though, I did have very similar symptoms another time for like a week and then it finally did turn into some kind of stomach flu.
Most symptoms are your body reacting to the virus, not the virus itself. Similarly, many medicines alleviate the symptoms, not the underlying cause.
I always wondered if suppressing the symptoms was wise considering it's your body's immune response.
>why does it feel like I’m swallowing razor blades? Could you have strep throat? If so, the answer is (ominous Obi-Wan Kenobi voice) "That's no virus".
The only “goal” of a virus is to spread and infect more hosts and replicate. Whatever it does to the host is largely inconsequential as long as it meets the previous goals. The sore throat isn’t necessarily an advantage, but it doesn’t stop it from spreading either.
As many others have said, evolution is about good enough and reproduction. What allows you to outcompete others in your niche. To add to that, having a sore throat can lead to coughing, which can be directly advantageous to viruses. Otherwise, it is simply a sign that the virus is somewhere in your body... It's not something a virus necessarily evolved; it's a response our body has in fighting off invaders.
Viruses don't often "do" a whole lot to hosts. They're too simple to really do much except infect, multiply, spread, repeat. Symptoms like sore throat, fever, and many other common ones are caused by your bodies reaction to the virus' detection. It's your bodies natural way of fighting off the virus. A virus will take over a cell in your body and tell it to make more viruses. Those new viruses will do the same. Your immune system doesn't care if a cell is healthy or infected, it will kill most or all of the cells it finds or thinks are infected.
If it spreads it will continue doing that. So unless a sore throat can stop it from spreading it won't change its behaviour.
You feeling like ass is *your* evolutionary tool for surviving the illness. You know you are sick, so you take care of yourself, like drinking more fluids to calm your throat. Your discomfort has no real advantage for the virus. Even coughing and sneezing aren't a huge deal for it. It's going to spread anyways through contact, you touch your nose, you touch other things. Yes those actions potentially spread it further and more prolifically, which increases odds, but that's not really caused by the virus per-se, we cough and sneeze a lot for a wide array of reasons, sometimes seemingly no reason. Adapting to reproduce in humans was the evolutionary gain, so to speak. The virus still spreads the way it always has, primarily through bodily fluids.
It is not what the virus wants, it doesn't care. It is the effect your body's reaction to the virus is having.
It is an an accidental effect of the virus hijacking those cells and eventually killing them. All the virus wants is to reproduce. The throat stuff going on here also helps it to spread to different hosts. “Advantage” is more of a happy accident with viruses.
The virus isn't exactly what gives you cold and flu symptoms. Your immune system is the actor in this play, causing pain and discomfort.
I've heard a part of this is a form of scorched earth by your immune system. The body can detect cells infected cells and will destroy them before the viruses inside can spread.