History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences· 2026Q1
The social life of viruses: a queer sort of science
- 0citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Sociovirology redefines 'aliveness' by studying virus-virus interactions and evolution, challenging the view of viruses as individualistic pathogens and proposing species-level evolution as a new norm for life.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Sociovirology examines virus-virus interactions and their impact on social evolution.
- This field uses social concepts (cooperation, altruism, cheating) to describe viral behavior.
- Sociovirology challenges the definition of life by focusing on species evolution rather than individual reproduction.
- The aliveness of viruses is indexed by their capacity to evolve as species.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract A burgeoning microbiology field, sociovirology is the study of how viruses interact with one another and the effects such interactions have on social evolution. Challenging dominant narratives that viruses are individualistic pathogens, sociovirologists explore the social interaction of viruses through the language of cooperation, altruism, and cheating, social concepts with biological definitions. Viruses cannot self-replicate—they must rely on living cells to reproduce—and thus are commonly believed to be biologically nonliving. By focusing on virus-virus interaction and evolution, sociovirologists are displacing reproduction as a chief engine of aliveness and queering biology and the concept of life. I contend that in sociovirological publications, the aliveness of viruses is indexed through sociovirologists’ use of language reserved for the interactions and social behaviors of life-forms alongside viruses’ ability to evolve. This paper illustrates that by attending to social behavior and evolution, sociovirologists are proffering novel approaches to both viruses and the concept of life that displaces individual organism reproduction and vertical inheritance as normative of life with species reproduction and species evolution as normative for viruses even if nonnormative for biological understandings of life. Viruses are alive because, as species, they evolve despite an individual viral particle’s fate.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2026 · DOI ↗
Continue with a free account
Ask the paper: 3 free questions a day about this paper; save it, get its citation, new summaries every day for your field. Takeaways are Premium.
Continue free on the webSign in with Google or Apple; no card needed. You come back to this paper.
On your phone:
Field: History and Philosophy of Science
History and Philosophy of ScienceArts and Humanities