Deep Vir

Chill Uncategorized

This is not really how viruses work, though. I mean, it’s kinda true if you understand very little and need a kindergarten-level comprehension? This all emerges from a reservoir of deep misunderstanding of the complexities involved, and the constraints on viral evolution. The above is just lockdown worship and lockdown life propaganda pseudoscientifically rebranded, which unfortunately Ian Welsh has started to engage in.

I’m not a virologist but I read vastly more than most people. So let’s talk a little about viral evolution and evolution in general. I will avoid most technical terms so my thoughts are accessible to most.

If you model a problem space to be solved, and evolution attempting to solve those problems, there are some solution configurations that evolution will never reach. For instance, it’s nearly impossible, even over infinite time scales, that a biological creature will evolve a jet engine as found on a 747. Why? Some of the steps are too onerous, too much of a leap, for blind evolution. However, obviously, jet engines are possible because we have them. Brute biology just cannot get there no matter what.

Now let’s bring it back to viruses. It’s harder for people to think about these things, I think, because viruses are so very minuscule and barely (or don’t) follow many of our macro intuitions. And because HIV is a highly-unusual virus but also the one that many are most familiar with (sort of). Suffice it to say, the SARS2 pathogen also has tradeoffs and constraints and configurations it can never achieve no matter how evolution influences it just like with my example of a jet engine above.

What are these limitations? Well, we don’t know all of them and probably never will, but SARS2 is definitely not infinitely-adaptable nor infinitely-malleable no matter how many hosts it infects or how it spreads. There are some — many! — states it will never get into no matter the time or infection pool, and even in those ones it can achieve there are large compromises. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that SARS2 will escape vaccines completely (or for long) because its mutation rate is actually very low and the mutations it can express (the problem space it can solve) tend to make it much less heat-tolerant.

That is one example — there are others. But my point is that when you hear this sort of catastrophizing and people becoming alarmingly aroused by the prospect of infinite lockdowns and hard borders forever, realize that though what they are doing might seem scientific, it’s little different than the anti-masker claiming that masks can’t work because their breath is able to go through them.

Don’t believe either group. Neither know even a little of what they are talking about.