Friday, April 24, 2020
Sidebar
Note that Greg Cochran over at West Hunter remains pessimistic about life becoming safer. Mutations are of course already occurring in C19, just from the numbers. Most of those will be deleterious to the virus itself, or neutral. But sheer volume produces mutations that are also diseases, some lesser, some greater.
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6 comments:
Presumably this virus hasn't been around since the creation, and it itself a mutation--likely of something milder. Likewise with the flu...
Cochran often points out that there's a common view that viruses always mutate to become harmless, but smallpox stayed deadly for centuries. It's not that easy to predict how a virus will change.
Some people are inclined to pessimistic views, which even expertise doesn’t overcome. I know some such folks. I don’t know this guy enough to know if he’s one of them.
I don't acknowledge that many people are smarter than I am. He's one.
He is the author of the quite wonderful The 10,000 Year Explosion about the genetic changes that allowed the Indo-Europeans to take over much of the world.
He may well be right. I don’t acknowledge many as smarter than me either; statistically there aren’t many. I say that to you only because it’s true for you too.
He’s right that it can go either way. It’s also right that it usually goes the one way. Evolution isn’t quite random; but it’s not selective. The selection mechanism is on the backside, i.e., elimination of mutations that aren’t adaptive. My guess is that mutation is more likely to help, because it is likely to lead the thing down a blind path.
Of course it could go the other way. But increased lethality has its own problems for a virus; we have almost beat Ebola. Just because it kills its hosts it’s got problems or its own survivability.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not worried anymore. Not about the virus; definitely about what it will take to avoid a depression. I think we will see it continue to subside into summer, and hopefully have therapeutics by a resurgence in the Fall —if it doesn’t mutate itself into obsolescence. It may not, but we have reason to hope it might.
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