The virus. A strange thing. Dead or Alive? What is its purpose? This may connect with Lavos, but I stayed away from putting this into a Chrono Forum, because this is much more general.
Plus, this is from the view of evolution.
What IS the virus. How did it come into being, and why was it created. The virus is nothing more then a protein strain, so why does it wish to infect and reproduce? It does nothing more then to create chaos. So why does it do it, what in its system tells it to do such a thing. Remember this is from a godless point of view, therefore you can't say god told it to. Same thing with bacteria, what tells it to do what it does? And all our tiny cells?
Maybe Lavos is a virus, just reproducing...
It is something of a mistake to assign human qualities to the concept of a virus. A virus has no "wish" to infect; there is no voice to "tell" it to do such a thing. This is because a virus has no conscious mind or animal instinct by which to experience such compulsions. A virus is an extremely simple organism, and because of this simplicity it is inherently immune to concerns of morality or other abstract qualities of biological rectitude.
Viruses behave in the way they do because this behavior has proven successful in their propagation. This is the same force of natural selection that applies to all organisms. Any trait that causes an organism to reproduce, results in more organisms that share this trait. It doesn't matter if the trait is "good" or "evil" by human standards.
You are right, however, that a virus isn't considered a
living organism. This is because it cannot reproduce on its own; it must infect a host cell. However, viruses are organic, they do contain genetic material of their own, and they share many similarities with simplistic life forms. Thus, the "not a living organism" classification is more an academic point of interest than an absolute one. Indeed, the definition of life is not easily pinned down, although scientific consensus has resulted in a list of criteria that generally classifies an organism as living or nonliving with little ambiguity. Viruses are something of a gray area that, as you said, are generally considered not to be alive. But please note that "nonliving" does not mean "dead," or even "inanimate." A virus is much closer to being alive than, say, a slab of basalt.
