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With the lack of a single origin, the central class of virus 'species' has been defined as follows, "A virus species is a polythetic class of viruses constituting a replicating lineage and occupying a particular ecological niche" (Van Regenmortel 1990). In dealing with obligate parasites, it is necessary to assign them to a particular niche. As we saw above, a polythetic class is a class that is defined by the congruence of multiple characteristics, no one of which is essential. This relatively loose definition opens up a space for the professionalization work that needs to be done in conjunction with the alignment of competing temporalities (of the virus and of the laboratory). There has in recent years developed a line of argument that with genome sequencing it will be possible to produce a coherent history of viruses that will make the species concept more historically accurate. This reflects a wider trend across many social and natural sciences to recover originsin geology the tide has turned against uniformitarianism (Allegre 1992); in philosophy, Foucault's archeology has grown up in opposition to the postmodern denial of origins. Even today, however, a strictly genetic classification of viruses is possibly leading to category death: |
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If mammalian viruses are descended from mammals, snake viruses from snakes, and honeybee viruses from honeybees, the group "virus" would cease to have any formal classificatory validity. It could be retained as a nonclassificatory group, analogous to the group of "animals with wings," but if it is not a monophyletic group, there is no doubt how cladism would deal with it; it presents no philosophical difficulty: the taxonomic category "virus" should be exploded. (Ridley 1986, 51) |
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The demotion to a nonclassificatory group would also have professional consequences. |
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We see with the history of virus classification, then, that there has been a deliberate effort to create something that looks and feels like other biological classifications, even though the virus itself transgresses basic categories (it jumps across hosts of different kinds, steals from its host, mutates rapidly, and so forth). This has partly been a deliberate political decision on the part of the international virus community: one needs such classification systems to write scientific papers, provide keywords for indexing and abstracting, compare results, and so on. Even in this most phenomenologically difficult of cases, the world must still be cut up into recognizable temporal and spatial unitspartly because that is the way the world is and partly because that is the only way that science as we know it can work. |
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