�And how, he wrote, "does thinking of viruses as male help us better understand viruses?
"I can call this e-mail an 'e-male' because I am sending it, and you can call it a 'female' because you are receiving it. I could even organize my e-mail into a 'male' box and a 'female' box. What a great idea. Unless you are titillated by such things, it is not helpful/useful/enlightening to think of viruses or outgoing e-mails as male."
My response: "The idea that viruses are 'male' is a proper extension of the nomenclature used to say that some bacteria are 'male.' The Chinese I Ching, or Book of Changes, describes male and female in the way that you've described male and female e-mail boxes. That description of male and female is too broad for most scientific purposes. Some of that kinds of descriptive thing still exists in English. Mechanical parts which are meant to join are sometimes referred to as 'male' and 'female,' for example.
"But I'm talking only about nucleic acid donors and recipients. I'm talking only about biology. I'm wanting the term 'male' to mean the same thing throughout all biological literature. That's for the sake of logic."
The response of Dr. Ronald Desrosiers has already been discussed, as has the fact that he's of French origin.
French, an older language than English, has gender distinctions which seem outdated or puzzling to those of us who did not grow up with the language. After Desrosiers commented on the gender of "milk," "straw," and "glass," I consulted a French dictionary. I still couldn't make sense of his reasoning; but, in any case, gender distinctions of the kind found in French aren't what I'm talking about here.
[ 4 ] Some more discussion about defining viral species There are questions in my mind about how both bacterial and viral species are defined, but I'll discuss only viral species here.
In some respects, viruses represent the ultimate in biological independence. In other ways, they are highly dependent.
An example of viral dependency, at least with respect to the way they are perceived by humans, is as follows: viruses usually depend for identification on some reference to that entity which a given virus infects. So there's often an tendency to name a virus for what I refer to as the "female moiety" of the virus.
Such is the case, for example, with the human influenza virus. That viral name is to tell us that the virus is a flu virus and that it reproduces in humans. Human immunodeficiency virus is another example. That name says that the virus in question reproduces in cells of the human immune system.
But some viruses infect more than one species. So, when referring to a virus together with its female moiety as consituting the viral species, one may need to modify the definition of viral species.
CONTINUE
article outline & index