- 28 Dec 2020 05:00
#15145357
I appreciate the post, but I'm curious to understand why, for example, the Hong Kong Flu eventually didn't kill as much, or the plague, etc etc.
Was it due to mutations that made it weaker, or the population becoming more immune after the "weak" were killed off?
XogGyux wrote:
Not saying that you are, but many people make the mistake that living organisms mutate with specific goals in mind. They might "wrongfully intuitively" assume that pathogen might mutate into a super bug that kills everything. As a general rule, it is disadvantageous to kill the host that is helping spread your offsprings so we see that more "successful" diseases such as the flu, are not super deadly but they spread very efficiently. That does not mean that spreading is something that will "always" benefit the pathogen, in many cases spreading means having ways of "tricking" the inmune system. For a virus, this might increase complexity (and complexity is not something you want if you lack all the proofreading and error-fixing machinery that most other complex organisms have). The result is, that there is a law of diminishing returns acting upon this.
Now... perhaps the most important part... is the "I told you so" factor. The naysayers that in february, march, april were crying "this will be over soon" or ignored the warnings about winter being worse, the holiday times being a disaster for spreading this thing, mutations.... The real question that I have is.. what is the number? What is the number of times that these people are going to be wrong, that after reaching "that number" they will realize that their "world" view is just wrong, they cannot even reasonably express what they expect for the relatively "near future". Seriously. Many of us "predicted" this.... not because we hold crystal balls that are magical, and certainly not because we were trying to make this "future" a reality (certainly I was not)... but rather because it was obvious, we were seeing being built and we could see the final product.
I appreciate the post, but I'm curious to understand why, for example, the Hong Kong Flu eventually didn't kill as much, or the plague, etc etc.
Was it due to mutations that made it weaker, or the population becoming more immune after the "weak" were killed off?
I can think of 11780 reasons Trump shouldn't be president ever again.