Natures wonders:ant care for the sick protects well ants. II (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 05, 2018, 18:16 (2422 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Not being able to see the coherence is why you are agnostic. My God knows what He is doing.

dhw: I have never said your God doesn’t know what he is doing. I am simply suggesting that the incoherence of the above scenario may indicate that YOU don’t know what your God is doing.

From recent research reported in Nature, viruses have been around since life was very early. Bacteria have their own viruses. Perhaps they are part of the requirement of diversity for diversity sake, a point you seem to love. I cannot tell whether God wanted this or allowed it.

Here is the Nature article:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04102-7?utm_source=briefing-dy&utm_mediu...

"Researchers have discovered more than 200 previously unknown viruses in a category whose members cause illnesses such as influenza and haemorrhagic fevers. The scientists also traced the origins of these RNA viruses back hundreds of millions of years to when most modern animals started to appear.

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"Holmes and his colleagues looked at nearly 190 creatures in other vertebrate classes — from jawless fish such as lampreys, which have changed little from their evolutionary ancestors, to reptiles such as turtles. By analysing the RNA extracted from the animals’ guts, livers, lungs or gills, the team discovered 214 RNA viruses that had never been described before.

"Most belong to virus families known to infect birds and mammals. For example, some fish harbour viruses that are related to Ebola, which causes a deadly disease in primates, including people. “That’s surprising,” says Holmes, but it doesn’t mean that those fish viruses pose a threat to human health. People and fish are so different that viruses that infect one group would not able to infect the other, he says.

"This is because most RNA viruses have evolved with their hosts for millions of years. When the researchers built an evolutionary tree of the new-found RNA viruses and compared it to that of their vertebrate hosts, the two histories mirrored each other. The team concluded that as vertebrates moved from the sea to land, so did their microscopic hitchhikers: RNA viruses that infect people today probably evolved from viruses that infected our vertebrate ancestors 500 million years ago.

"Scientists suspected that RNA viruses were ancient because they are found in single-celled organisms such as amoebas2 and in invertebrates such as insects and worms3. But this study shows it “very convincingly”, says Eric Delwart, a virologist at the Blood Systems Research Institute in San Francisco, California."

Comment: Life appears driven to start early on an inhospitable Earth. Perhaps the drive was so strong it also produced partial life as exemplified by viruses, and we left to wonder whether God wanted them or not.