
Bonnie Bassler on Talkative Bacteria and Eavesdropping Viruses
The Joy of x
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The Viruses Are Listening the Whole Time
Viruses are not even considered alive. They have to hijack the machinery of something else that's alive just to reproduce. The calculation is, when do i replicate and make hundreds of copies of myself? And if there aren't enough bacteria around, that's a bad idea,. Youre ging to pop and there's going to be no homes for all your kids. So this is the crazy thing. I mean, i make it sound like the viruses are thinking about it, but these are little bits of chemistry. It's like the simplest form of intelligence i've ever heard of. We're not even talking about biological intelligence. This is through natural selection at the level of chemistry
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