Winner
Diverse in Unity
First, let me begin with the good news: WATL (Winner's Apocalypse Threat Level*) for the Mexican flu event is down to 1 on 5-point scale, which means the world is not going to end this time. I leave it on 1 because there is a negligible risk that the virus mutates into a more virulent strain.
Now, what I am up to. For you who've read "Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues" by Frank Ryan, it will be easier to understand, for the rest, I'll sum it up:
The author of the book introduces concepts of "genomic intelligence" and "agressive symbiosis" to describe the evolutionary "purpose" of viruses.
Virus isn't a senseless killer which just wants to cause death and suffering. Like any other living thing, it "wants" to spread and prosper. This is why most diseases gradually evolve and change to become less lethal and less acute - that way they have a better chance of surviving, whereas if they killed are possible hosts they'd die with them. The ultimate "good" for a virus is to become practically harmless for its host - an animal, plant or human. This allows him to co-exist with the host species and its survival is thus assured. This is what he understands under the term of "genomic intelligence" - the virus is, in its own way, a rational organism.
Having read this, you want to ask: "OK, so the virus wants to be harmless to us, fine. But why should we allow it to live inside our bodies? What do we get from it?" The answer lies in the concept of "aggressive symbiosis". For symbiosis to work, both organisms must profit from the presence of the other. In the case of animal-virus relationship, the advantage the host gets is a powerful "natural bioweapon" which protects it from possible competitors. For example, one group of monkeys has a certain strain of virus in their bodies, but the virus is harmless to them. But when another competing group of monkeys violate their territory, it might get infected with it and for them, the virus will be deadly since they lack a natural immunity. In the book the author offers many examples of this happing regularly in African jungles. Thus, viruses might be a natural way how to help a species to defend its territory or to push a competing species from its territory.
To some extend, the same principle applies to human populations - when Europeans first visited the Americas, the epidemic diseases they carried with them wiped out nearly 90% of the Native American population. They had the advantage of being hosts to many different types of diseases the Native Americans had never met before - thus being very sensitive to them. Jared Diamond explained why it was the Europeans, not the Aztecs or Inca who won the "bio-battle". In short, Eurasia's populations were more connected, bigger, dense and had more species of domesticated animals acting like sources of epidemic diseases. As a result, Eurasia was much larger "bioreactor" producing more diseases.
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Now, what I find very interesting about these concepts is that they explain the so-called "emerging diseases" like Ebola, Marburg etc. Now more than ever, humans are invading the natural reservoirs of biodiversity, the tropical rainforests. High biodiversity means more animals and also more animals close to humans - primates for example, all mammals to a lesser degree.
From nature's point of view, humans are just another group of monkeys invading a territory of another - therefore we are susceptible to the biological weapon arsenals found among many of the animal species living in the rainforests. Sure, most of them can't harm us, but from time to time, we meet an exception like Ebola: a very deadly and virulent disease that tells us "get the hell out!". These diseases are like nature's "immune system", they make it harder for the intruder - us - to destroy it.
What the author of "Virus X" is worried about is our carelessness. Just look at it:
Now more than ever, we are vulnerable to a biological attack, either by nature or ourselves (terrorists, cults, individual nutjobs or simply by accident).
Imagine a truly dangerous disease combining Ebola-like mortality with flu-like communicability rate. Wherever would it appear first, it would spread fast around the world, killing not millions, but hundreds of millions, maybe billions.
I am a sceptic, but I do think that this is perhaps the greatest danger for our civilization. Forget global warming, asteroids or nuclear war, this is what can easily happen and we're practically begging for it.
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(*) Believe me, I have a well-developed sense of doom as well as healthy scepticism in my genes. When I am convinced we're all going to die, we will
Now, what I am up to. For you who've read "Virus X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues" by Frank Ryan, it will be easier to understand, for the rest, I'll sum it up:
The author of the book introduces concepts of "genomic intelligence" and "agressive symbiosis" to describe the evolutionary "purpose" of viruses.
Virus isn't a senseless killer which just wants to cause death and suffering. Like any other living thing, it "wants" to spread and prosper. This is why most diseases gradually evolve and change to become less lethal and less acute - that way they have a better chance of surviving, whereas if they killed are possible hosts they'd die with them. The ultimate "good" for a virus is to become practically harmless for its host - an animal, plant or human. This allows him to co-exist with the host species and its survival is thus assured. This is what he understands under the term of "genomic intelligence" - the virus is, in its own way, a rational organism.
Having read this, you want to ask: "OK, so the virus wants to be harmless to us, fine. But why should we allow it to live inside our bodies? What do we get from it?" The answer lies in the concept of "aggressive symbiosis". For symbiosis to work, both organisms must profit from the presence of the other. In the case of animal-virus relationship, the advantage the host gets is a powerful "natural bioweapon" which protects it from possible competitors. For example, one group of monkeys has a certain strain of virus in their bodies, but the virus is harmless to them. But when another competing group of monkeys violate their territory, it might get infected with it and for them, the virus will be deadly since they lack a natural immunity. In the book the author offers many examples of this happing regularly in African jungles. Thus, viruses might be a natural way how to help a species to defend its territory or to push a competing species from its territory.
To some extend, the same principle applies to human populations - when Europeans first visited the Americas, the epidemic diseases they carried with them wiped out nearly 90% of the Native American population. They had the advantage of being hosts to many different types of diseases the Native Americans had never met before - thus being very sensitive to them. Jared Diamond explained why it was the Europeans, not the Aztecs or Inca who won the "bio-battle". In short, Eurasia's populations were more connected, bigger, dense and had more species of domesticated animals acting like sources of epidemic diseases. As a result, Eurasia was much larger "bioreactor" producing more diseases.
---
Now, what I find very interesting about these concepts is that they explain the so-called "emerging diseases" like Ebola, Marburg etc. Now more than ever, humans are invading the natural reservoirs of biodiversity, the tropical rainforests. High biodiversity means more animals and also more animals close to humans - primates for example, all mammals to a lesser degree.
From nature's point of view, humans are just another group of monkeys invading a territory of another - therefore we are susceptible to the biological weapon arsenals found among many of the animal species living in the rainforests. Sure, most of them can't harm us, but from time to time, we meet an exception like Ebola: a very deadly and virulent disease that tells us "get the hell out!". These diseases are like nature's "immune system", they make it harder for the intruder - us - to destroy it.
What the author of "Virus X" is worried about is our carelessness. Just look at it:
- human population is getting bigger and denser, making it easier for a virus to spread;
- human societies are much more connected than ever before, any disease can travel onboard and international flight from Africa to Europe or America in less than a day;
- humans are penetrating deeper and deeper into places where biodiversity is the highest, thus making it much more possible that they run into something deadly;
- human civilization now has the means to produce artificial hybrid viruses more deadly than whatever nature can come up with.
Now more than ever, we are vulnerable to a biological attack, either by nature or ourselves (terrorists, cults, individual nutjobs or simply by accident).
Imagine a truly dangerous disease combining Ebola-like mortality with flu-like communicability rate. Wherever would it appear first, it would spread fast around the world, killing not millions, but hundreds of millions, maybe billions.
I am a sceptic, but I do think that this is perhaps the greatest danger for our civilization. Forget global warming, asteroids or nuclear war, this is what can easily happen and we're practically begging for it.
----
(*) Believe me, I have a well-developed sense of doom as well as healthy scepticism in my genes. When I am convinced we're all going to die, we will
but if it helps people to understand, let's go for it. 
