The physical nature of prions is well described and they have been isolated since the 80s. Several avenues of research involve isolating them from tissues of all kinds of animals. (Google it in scholar.) It's their mechanism of action in their hypothetical contribution to several diseases that the ... people who study them are busy investigating. (I said that nice-like.) In other words prions can be chemically isolated from tissue. The people studying them hypothesize that they cause diseases but they can't show how. The most popular hypothetical model has the infectious prion somehow convincing conformational isomers of target protiens to spontaneously go to pleated sheet form but they can't find a mechanism. The USDA has methods of detecting them in stock because they are always associated BSE. One school of thought is that it's not prion alone that cause disease but that there is some other agent involved that hasn't been discovered yet. Prions are not life forms. Language is a barrier to understanding scientific concepts. One of the things that made Einstein so great is that he could take concepts like relativity and explain them in simple terms. We are all aware of his use of trains to explain relativity but he also used a simple string pendulum and no hard core, Lorentz Transformation type math to explain it as well. Anyway, he was good at it and some how language was not a barrier for him
But he's dead and we have no replacement. Look in any modern science text book, any evolution text book and I guarantee it is stuffed with teleology. Look at the common meanings of words like "selection" and "altruism" and others and then look at how they are used in evolution. They are not related. The use of these words in scientific conversations excludes everyone else from understanding - leading to many bad, bad bad misconceptions about evolution.
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