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  Mike
  21 July 2023 at 10:28 am

  In our universe, life may exist on many planets, more or less similar to Tellus, the Earth. As the only life we know is life on Earth, our ideas about life in the universe are naturally based on what we know about this life and its various aspects, such as its origin from an energetic point of view.

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  Rob Verkerk https://www.anhinternational.org
  22 July 2023 at 8:26 am

  Indeed, Mike. But it also seems increasingly that NASA, the militaries of certain nations, and others, seem to know a bit more about life beyond this planet than governments and prominent astrobiologists and cosmologists care to admit ;-)

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  Mike
  28 July 2023 at 10:05 am

  There have been some extraordinary claims (especially in the recent US Congress hearings), and, to quote Carl Sagan, they require extraordinary evidence. Nothing has yet appeared to qualify this need - and this is likely to be another example of how some undisclosed documents in this case about UFOs are not synonymous with incontrovertible evidence that (insert whichever cause you wish here) but in this matter - that aliens have visited Earth.

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  Mike
  21 July 2023 at 11:14 am

  If a virus is alive, should we not also consider a DNA molecule to be alive? Plasmids can transfer as conjugative molecules, or be passively transferred, between cells, and they may carry genes obtained from the host. They are simply DNA molecules, although they may be essential for the host’s survival in certain environments. What about prions? The argument reductio ad absurdum is that any biologically produced mineral that can act as a crystallisation seed for further mineralisation (hence meeting the criterion of reproducibility) might also be classified as living!

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  Rob Verkerk https://www.anhinternational.org
  22 July 2023 at 8:16 am

  Thanks for your your considered and interesting input, Mike, a thorny and fascinating subject that has occupied the minds of us biologists and over which there still remains no clear consensus! It’s one of those areas, it seems, where….any view goes — perhaps it’s our desire to categorise things in binary terms, as living or non-living, that’s the underlying problem we face over how we consider viruses. Our minds seems to want to apportion everything around us into clear and defined categories, and that’s perhaps more a feature, or limitation, the mental capacities of us human beings. We don’t do grey well! At ANH, we tend to think of viruses as biological chemicals with energetic properties, existing somewhere between living and non-living, given that we perhaps now have a wider view of what life is, and it goes beyond some of the older views of being simply the ability to replicate. Life, and evolution, can’t function without viruses. Villareal’s perspectives described in his Scientific American from >15 years back was among the first I was aware of to take this view: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-viruses-alive-2004/.

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  Mike
  24 July 2023 at 9:57 am

  It is not an area in which I have spent any serious time - albeit whichever side of 'are viruses alive' will require a definition of life, which as you covered in the early stages of this talk is also open to definition. Viruses are without independent membrane-induced metabolic function - i.e. no 'spark of life' yet are abundant and provide considerable advantages to us via early endosymbiosis. Just as bacteria also swim in the benefit-risk pool of survival so do viruses - however, the philosophically orientated discussion of whether they are alive is balanced on the equally slippery discussion of determining life - an inevitably wobbly combination permitting 'any view'?

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  Mike
  21 July 2023 at 1:13 pm

  His proposition for Covid defense is an incomplete explanation of immune response and is based on the unknown efficacy of invariant NK cells - which whilst of obvious interest in infection, cancer and autoimmune control due to their rapid activation their role in each of these is yet to be fully understood. They are as he suggests capable of being activated in a healthy human or mouse model within hours - however, there is no data indicating that their efficacy is immutable. In turn, exhausted NK cells are present in Chronically infected Sars Cov2 victims, suggesting they have a role in generating cytokines and chemokines and possibly IfNgamma - but the energy and nutrients required for this process are clearly lacking in the majority of the population with metabolic dysfunction - albeit that nasal delivered iNKT stimulants are already in development. Keep in mind that iNKT cells constitute up to 1% of peripheral blood mononuclear cells in both humans and mice, although the variability is greater among humans.
  
  The use of the SAN as an example of resilience and stability is also fraught with conflict - The life of the San is characterised and influenced by the inhospitable territory where they live, 20% of the children die in the first year of life, 50% die before the age of 15, while the average life expectation is about 45- 50 years and only 10% get over 60 years of age.

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  Rob Verkerk https://www.anhinternational.org
  22 July 2023 at 8:49 am

  Great respect to both your and Leo’s immunological perspectives - albeit ones that stem from your different backgrounds and approach. Like you, I was also interested in Leo’s use of the South African and other indigenous people as a template for his ‘Homo sapient robusta’ concept, but he’s coming at it from a evolutionary/selection pressure perspective and he made it quite clear in the interview that, as such, lifespan after reproductive age is irrelevant and I don’t think it’s hard to see around us a lot of people that are increasingly fragile. I found his view particularly interesting that there is no easy way for us to adapt, evolutionarily, to the mental health problems being caused by the current digital age because the selection pressure is so inconsequential. He was also saying that it is the lifestyles, habits and environments of non-modernised, indigenous peoples that make them robust, i.e. not fragile, meaning they can cope with living in environments that most of us would really struggle with given our relative fragility. His Intermittent Living initiative is all about how we can benefit by applying additional stressors to our own lives, ones that are relevant to our evolutionary past, contributing to making us become more resilient. In a world that seems increasingly intolerant of divergent perspectives on health, I think we all benefit from being exposed to multiple perspectives - and we’re grateful both to you and Leo for your perspectives.

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