Replies

I was taught in high school and college that although viruses can replicate that there is really some debate as to whether they are really alive. They don't really fall into the living organism category, do they?

Whether or not viruses are life is irrelevant to this evidence. We can observe viruses inserting their DNA into our DNA strands. We can observe our body's defenses against viruses infecting our reproductive cells. We can observe that sometimes, they get through and we pass on viral genes. We can observe that DNA mutates at a very specific rate. These observations plus a documented human and chimpanzee genome are all that is needed to come to the conclusion of speciation.

I was taught in high school and college that although viruses can replicate that there is really some debate as to whether they are really alive.

That is because "aliveness" is a continuum and not a binary state if evaluated in a strict and rigorous fashion, though we tend to treat "alive" as a binary condition in common usage.

There is almost an unbroken chain of self-replicating molecular entities in nature starting with simple molecules all the way up to big critters like humans. Viruses occupy one part of that chain of molecular complexity right around the gray area where we stop treating them as complex molecules and start treating them as macro-systems as a matter of functional complexity. "Aliveness" is a continuum and putting the breaking point at any one point in the chain of complexity is arbitrary, as the entities on either side of any breaking point will be nearly identical in nature.