NationStates Jolt Archive

Silly little biological question; I'm just trying to understand something. The classification of virii as living or non-living things is still fairly sketchy, given how they have genes but are limited in their ability to produce proteins. But regardless of whether an individual virion "cell" is alive or not, is there any sense of cooperation between multiple virus bodies? Do they subscribe to a sort of group mentality, or do like-strains compete with each other even if that competition comes at the expense of the group?

Silly little biological question; I'm just trying to understand something. The classification of virii as living or non-living things is still fairly sketchy, given how they have genes but are limited in their ability to produce proteins. But regardless of whether an individual virion "cell" is alive or not, is there any sense of cooperation between multiple virus bodies? Do they subscribe to a sort of group mentality, or do like-strains compete with each other even if that competition comes at the expense of the group?
I've never heard of anything like that. I always thought viruses behaved like a complex poison molecule. Drifting through the body until they find a cell to bind to and kill by hijacking it's machinery to make more viruses. AFAIK they don't move under their own power, and don't interact with anything but the cells they latch on to and infect. Makes cooperation kind of hard.

I believe, and i could be wrong, that it is an "every virus for itself" mentality. The main thought of a virus is to take over, replicate, repeat. I don't believe that there is any sort of hive mentality-- as for competition, it is Darwinism at its finest, the ones that can take over the cells and multiply survive, the others don't.

There is no hive mind like co-operation with most if not all virii. They simply reproduce and spread to another host. The more poorly adapted virusses will in fact kill the host it infects thus massively limiting the amount of time it has to reproduce and dooming those of its cohorts that have not already spread.

It may be that some viriiseses appear to work together in some cases, though none that i know of, but this is simply blind chance and varourable adaption.