Viruses descended from progenotes?

[bascule]

So says the Discover March '06 cover story:

 

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

 

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.

 

"This thing shows that some viruses are organisms that have an ancestor that was much more complex than they are now," says Didier Raoult, one of the leaders of the research team at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France, that identified the virus. "We have a lot of evidence with Mimivirus that the virus phylum is at least as old as the other branches of life and that viruses were involved very early on in the evolutionary emergence of life."

[bascule]

This is probably a better quote:

 

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.

 

Wouldn't this discovery seem akin to, say, physics unifying gravity will all the other forces? (ignoring our present inability to unify strong with electroweak for the time being) I mean, this seems to be the discovery which unifies Archaea, Prokaryotes, and Eukaryotes with Viruses. The other three were comparatively easy to unify and viruses have long been the odd-thing out (much like gravity). Now they are unified into a single, coherent, evidence-based picture.

[zyncod]

I had always kind of thought something like this might have been the case. I mean, we have the RNA world hypothesis as the most likely possibility for the origin of life, and viruses alone among all organisms have RNA genomes (and DNA genomes).

 

I find viruses to be very interesting, so I don't really like the Ayn Rand reference in the article ("prime mover"). Nothing rational should ever be associated with Ayn Rand.

[Sashatheman]

i really wanted to know more about this bit in the article. it said "systems are being discovered and studied which are neither obviously living nor obviously dead"

 

But yeh the rest o the article is very itneresting indeed.