Viruses are non living

Hmm... I was hoping for a little more substance from my opponent, but no matter.1. Circular ReasoningMy opponent argues that viruses are not living organisms because they are capsules of genetic material, the assumption being that capsules of genetic material are not living things, therefore viruses are not living things. This is circular logic. You are defining what a virus is as "non-living" and then using that as justification for your argument. Yes they require a host to reproduce, yes they are capsules with genetic material, but the same can be said about cells. The only difference is that cells are more complicated due to the fact they use themselves as the host. Other than that, they are basically capsules of genetic material. Who are you to say how complicated a life-form must be before we can call it a life-form? It's completely arbitrary and therefore we have to re-work our understanding of what constitutes life. 2. Can't Survive On their OwnPro states that a virus could not survive on its own. This statement is nonsense. As I stated in R1, viruses can survive even in a vacuum. Yes, they need a host to reproduce, but reproduction isn't a requirement for their species to live on since they are technically immortal. "Ah ha!" One might think "if they are functionally immortal, then they can't be called living! Life without death is like light without darkness, the only way to have one is to have the other and therefore if a virus cannot die then it cannot be called alive!"Not so fast, several things you would consider "alive" are also functionally immortal. Trees, for example, have no known natural life-span. Trees have been known to continue truckin' along at well over 4000 years old, with one clonal tree living an estimated 80,000 - 1,000,000 years [1] (although that last one is debatable for a series of reason I won't get into here). This functional immortality isn't just a plant thing either. Consider the Turritopsis nutricula, or as it's more commonly known, the immortal jellyfish. The immortal jellyfish survives by reverting back to it's pre-pubescent stage whenever it is about to die of old age [2]. Okay, but that's just a jelly, right? What about more complex life-forms? Well, here's a short list of animals either confirmed to be immortal, or at least have a reasonable amount of data backing the idea that they are immortal [3]. This list includes animals such as lobsters, the Aldabra Giant Tortoise, the rough-eye rockfish, etc. My point here is that life is far more robust and diverse than we have historically given it credit for and we, as a species, need to seriously re-consider what we define "life" as.3. Rocks Cannot LivePro states that rocks cannot live on their own because rocks aren't alive. Hold on to that thought for a minute, because this whole "what is life" question is about to get a whole lot more complicated.Let's look at Pprions. Prions are an infectious agent, much like viruses. They reproduce and even evolve via natural selection. The difference is that prions don't have a capsule or any DNA. Prions are merely mis-folded proteins that re-produce by connecting with other proteins and mis-folding them accordingly [4], and as stated earlier, they evolve [5]. Famous examples of prions are Mad Cow Disease and Variant CJD ( the human version of mad cow disease). So now we have something that is basically the structural equivalent of a rock both capable of reproduction and evolution. For all intents and purposes, prions are living things. It's easy enough to brush aside viruses as being only about as alive as rocks are, but when the rocks start having sex and evolving, where does that leave your argument? Note: I know that rocks are made of minerals, not proteins. Just keep in mind that we know for a fact that abiogenesis happened at some point, so we already know it's possible for rocks to somehow form into proteins and start doing "life things".4. Biologists Are Re-Defining LifeThis recent discoveries I've talked about here haven't gone unnoticed by biologists. There never was an unequivocal definition of life, but the definition biologists used is being re-examined to account for these findings. For example, biologyonline.org now explicitly includes viruses under their definition of a living organism [6].ConclusionPro has basically dropped my entire R1 argument and instead simply re-stated his original position. Once again, it is pro's burden to justify that there is some sort of logical necessity to excluding parasitic lifeforms under our conception of life. Simply asserting that this is the case is not adequate, especially now that biologists themselves are starting to change the "official" definition of life in response to the information presented above. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org...2. http://en.wikipedia.org... 3. http://voices.yahoo.com... 4. http://www.news-medical.net... 5. http://www.newscientist.com... 6. http://www.biology-online.org...