Did viruses precede other life?

Hiya, Lex.It is true that a virus needs a host. However, that host need not have been something that we would consider to be "life" -- the original hosts of viruses (virii?) may have been precursors that were far simpler than what we would be comfortable with assigning to the category of "living".Here is an link to an article to which I have already posted that suggests that viruses may have been an important contributor to what eventually became "life".

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"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
-- H. L. Mencken (quoted on Panda's Thumb)

A couple of possibilities.They could be very simplified versions of cellular organisms; cellular parasites that simplified to the point of no longer being cells.They could be the products of cellular organisms. Some cellular organism experienced a mutation that gave it a set of genes that reproduced independently of the organism itself -- sort of like a cancer.They could be an independent product of the abiogenetic process that also produced cellular life.Probably other possibilities exist.Clearly no one really knows; this is a continuing area of research.

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw