Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like ‘living’ does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
While the Coronavirus spreads disease and death, scientists fight over whether viruses themselves, including the novel coronavirus, can be said to be alive. In an article titled Are viruses alive? The replicator paradigm sheds decisive light on an old but misguided question,’ the biologist Eugene Koonin begins with an example which is very familiar to us today – in times of Covid-19:
“Alcohol-based hand sanitizers kill most types of bacteria, viruses and fungi in a few seconds” – claims a random ad in a family magazine. Regardless of the technical (in)accuracy of this statement, its anonymous author(s) has unwittingly answered, in the affirmative, a question that over several decades had been debated by many scientists: Are viruses alive?
The logic here is simple: you cannot kill something that is not alive.
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