As long as there is an acknowledgement of counter-examples - of the non-infinite ability of the "tendency" to ordain future reality. Viruses will mysteriously become and stay virulent for extended periods sometimes, especially if populations are unhealthy. A possible *decades-long* example was "sweating sickness."
The human idea of vaccination, and modern ''vaccination'' even more so, is based on the following assumptions, which are not described anywhere in such a way, but which must be presupposed in such a way if vaccination/''vaccination'', according to science, is to be a good idea:
- all people live under the same environmental conditions
- all people eat the same food and have a good nutritional status,
- each person's metabolism works the same as everyone else's,
- every human being has the same immune system,
- every human being reacts in the same way to completely different external influences,
- every human being receives the same vaccination at the same time and in the same place,
- every human being has the same "normal" genome, whatever "normal" means,
- every human has the same viral gene sequences in her/his genome from previous infections,
- every human being reacts the same way to the same vaccination,
- every human being feels the same way about the administration of the vaccine,
- you are me and I am you and everybody is everone else
- we are all the same person and we hide this inconvenient truth behind different facades.
''an artifact of our pattern-seeking view of reality, which creates “difference” where there is none, and misses it when it is there''
Bull's-eye. Bio-logical coherence is based on simple correlations in all possible scales and over all possible periods of time, which are always repeated in different cycles with the smallest and smallest deviations. Man, however, tries more and more to simplify (!) what is already simple by fragmentation, by measurements and isolated observations. But the more such simplifications shape man's view of the world, the more complex the world appears to him because of all the fragments of simple natural connections. The finely (inter)woven tapestry of reality becomes thus an mere jumble of countless loose threads.
Fantastic. In my eyes, your best text yet. ''Best'' in the sense of bio-logical coherence and our place in that coherence.
Viruses are indeed the messengers between the epigenetic influences of the environment and the genetics of all living beings, including us humans of course. Thus, symptoms are the vocabulary of the course of each individual disease history. Ignoring or eliminating the vocabulary does not mean that the story never happened, only that it can no longer be told. And the longer it goes untold, the more untruths and misunderstandings accumulate.
Thank you - I feel the same RE the post. In a way it marks being able to talk freely about the flaws because I've come closer to finding where those flaws boundaries are. I had to verify that there was at least some rigor to how flu and polio were serotyped and associated with outcomes, for example, to rule out that the role of the viruses wasn't entirely imaginary to begin with. Then I could critique the total, constant ignorance of all the other involved factors.
Yes, viruses are functionally like a tessellated light. When a fragment of light passes over us we blame it for revealing what a moment before had been hiding in the dark, and set to work on how to ensure sustained darkness. We "illuminate" the light in order to escape its revelations.
''Equilibrium,'' a state that by nature should not be permanent unless it is death.
''The general flourishing of multicellular life implies a (retrospectively observed) default for successful coevolution between existing multicellular hosts and their ''favorite'' viral and bacterial ''invaders''6; what else should this coevolution be called but ''equilibrium''?''
Viruses, the paradox of evolution? Living? Not alive? They appear like the last digit of an irrational number and therefore seem like an impossibility. And yet they embody THE essence of life, namely to be energy striving for said ''equilibrium'' in order (!!!) not (!!!) to reach it. Therefore their working must always be in some kind of flow and thus their flow-ness cannot be grasped with dear simplistic methods of science. For these methods the last digit of the irrational number remains eternally unreachable. But what to do in order to be able to come closer to the viral essence after all? Do not care about the number, but consistently attend the flow of life. To stand clothed on the bank of a river does not let you understand what it means to swim naked against the current of natural selection.
"Who we are - our identity - is paradoxically defined by who we are not: Our differences from others, or the reactions elicited in others by our behavior."
I agree with this, and found it fascinating that our immune system uses this at the cellular level to determine which bits need to be attacked and which bits are ok to leave alone.
Well, if you believe that this virus arose naturally - as the influenza virus did in your example, you would have to believe that it could very easily get more virulent. A mutation could occur to allow this to happen.
However, if your Covid virus was made in a lab, and serially passed thru mammalian hosts in order to achieve the desired result of the GOF research, then likely most mutations will lead the other way.
Serial passage though mammalian hosts/cell lines is sufficient to generate a strain that successfully infects and transmits between humans. But I would argue that it is almost certainly not sufficient to explore the full mutation space and gravitate toward a fitness maximum. That will only happen with massive series-parallel evolution among quadrillions of viruses in millions of hosts, i.e. in an actual pandemic. If I had to guess I would say that Delta represents that pinnacle and that mutations from here on out will likely favor immune evasion at the cost of fitness/virulence.
Agree, as far as "real" increases to virulence goes. But spontaneous increases potentially driven by host and intermediary (microbiome + environment) changes are still always on the table.
Viruses become successful when they choose a replication target with specific characteristics which appear to indicate unnatural actions by the hosts. This one targets those who have chosen lifestyles contrary to our evolution, and have become unhealthy. Nature punishes renegades. Maybe a constructive outcome will be for more people to learn and adopt more natural lifestyles.
Viruses never get all of us, just a few. Important to learn what they did wrong, and don't do that.
It seems to me that a better model for a "novel" pathogen in the human population would be an initial worsening as the pathogen optimizes itself to infect and spread between humans, followed by a decline in virulence driven both by selective pressure on the virus (to have less-sick mobile hosts out and about transmitting) and immune evasion mutation pressure from the host (with most immune-evasion mutations also moving the virus away from a fitness optimum in terms of infectivity). The 1918 pandemic followed a similar pattern.
If we haven't completely messed things up with mass deployment of novel vaccines, we should be moving into the declining phase, with Omicron likely representing immune evasion at the cost of lower virulence.
For modern commentators, SARS-1 is supposed to be the model - rapid, early evolution as the virus acclimates. But then why did the virus "acclimate" itself out of existence / into other animals? I've never looked into the alleged gene tree. The whole thing never passed the "not just everyone's imagination" smell test at the time and still doesn't.
Which leads to another explanation which I didn't include because it was so redundant it would have rendered the post incoherent - "the virus" as mass hysteria (an obvious possibility from the start, given the reaction to the media theatre in March 2020; also covered by the recent post at https://chriswaldburger.substack.com/p/was-covid-a-quantum-event ; but perhaps best covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania).
So... sometimes the mass hysteria takes a second year to launch, and then it has "burned out." 1968 and 2020 both had huge political distractions that might have numbed the first round from reaching critical mass.
Back to reality, it's still important to notice that my "second year" example still has the mirror built in. So it can simultaneously be true that the "axiom" is correct and that SARS-CoV-2 "became more virulent" as observed in reality. But a "tune up, then tune down" model is certainly plausible.
I've never thought of it as an axiom, just more of a general tendency.
As long as there is an acknowledgement of counter-examples - of the non-infinite ability of the "tendency" to ordain future reality. Viruses will mysteriously become and stay virulent for extended periods sometimes, especially if populations are unhealthy. A possible *decades-long* example was "sweating sickness."
"Measured by ability to knock over full grown trees bare-handed, no human is “strong.”
Well, you missed one guy: Jazz singer/pianist Mose Allison in his song "Wild Man" :
"I cut redwood with a handsaw..."
Just to lighten things up a little...;>)
I am not aware of this claim having been verified by the Truth in Jazz Advertising Certification Board
The human idea of vaccination, and modern ''vaccination'' even more so, is based on the following assumptions, which are not described anywhere in such a way, but which must be presupposed in such a way if vaccination/''vaccination'', according to science, is to be a good idea:
- all people live under the same environmental conditions
- all people eat the same food and have a good nutritional status,
- each person's metabolism works the same as everyone else's,
- every human being has the same immune system,
- every human being reacts in the same way to completely different external influences,
- every human being receives the same vaccination at the same time and in the same place,
- every human being has the same "normal" genome, whatever "normal" means,
- every human has the same viral gene sequences in her/his genome from previous infections,
- every human being reacts the same way to the same vaccination,
- every human being feels the same way about the administration of the vaccine,
- you are me and I am you and everybody is everone else
- we are all the same person and we hide this inconvenient truth behind different facades.
That's science, what else.
''an artifact of our pattern-seeking view of reality, which creates “difference” where there is none, and misses it when it is there''
Bull's-eye. Bio-logical coherence is based on simple correlations in all possible scales and over all possible periods of time, which are always repeated in different cycles with the smallest and smallest deviations. Man, however, tries more and more to simplify (!) what is already simple by fragmentation, by measurements and isolated observations. But the more such simplifications shape man's view of the world, the more complex the world appears to him because of all the fragments of simple natural connections. The finely (inter)woven tapestry of reality becomes thus an mere jumble of countless loose threads.
Fantastic. In my eyes, your best text yet. ''Best'' in the sense of bio-logical coherence and our place in that coherence.
Viruses are indeed the messengers between the epigenetic influences of the environment and the genetics of all living beings, including us humans of course. Thus, symptoms are the vocabulary of the course of each individual disease history. Ignoring or eliminating the vocabulary does not mean that the story never happened, only that it can no longer be told. And the longer it goes untold, the more untruths and misunderstandings accumulate.
Thank you - I feel the same RE the post. In a way it marks being able to talk freely about the flaws because I've come closer to finding where those flaws boundaries are. I had to verify that there was at least some rigor to how flu and polio were serotyped and associated with outcomes, for example, to rule out that the role of the viruses wasn't entirely imaginary to begin with. Then I could critique the total, constant ignorance of all the other involved factors.
Yes, viruses are functionally like a tessellated light. When a fragment of light passes over us we blame it for revealing what a moment before had been hiding in the dark, and set to work on how to ensure sustained darkness. We "illuminate" the light in order to escape its revelations.
''Equilibrium,'' a state that by nature should not be permanent unless it is death.
''The general flourishing of multicellular life implies a (retrospectively observed) default for successful coevolution between existing multicellular hosts and their ''favorite'' viral and bacterial ''invaders''6; what else should this coevolution be called but ''equilibrium''?''
Viruses, the paradox of evolution? Living? Not alive? They appear like the last digit of an irrational number and therefore seem like an impossibility. And yet they embody THE essence of life, namely to be energy striving for said ''equilibrium'' in order (!!!) not (!!!) to reach it. Therefore their working must always be in some kind of flow and thus their flow-ness cannot be grasped with dear simplistic methods of science. For these methods the last digit of the irrational number remains eternally unreachable. But what to do in order to be able to come closer to the viral essence after all? Do not care about the number, but consistently attend the flow of life. To stand clothed on the bank of a river does not let you understand what it means to swim naked against the current of natural selection.
"Who we are - our identity - is paradoxically defined by who we are not: Our differences from others, or the reactions elicited in others by our behavior."
I agree with this, and found it fascinating that our immune system uses this at the cellular level to determine which bits need to be attacked and which bits are ok to leave alone.
Well, if you believe that this virus arose naturally - as the influenza virus did in your example, you would have to believe that it could very easily get more virulent. A mutation could occur to allow this to happen.
However, if your Covid virus was made in a lab, and serially passed thru mammalian hosts in order to achieve the desired result of the GOF research, then likely most mutations will lead the other way.
Just a thought.
Serial passage though mammalian hosts/cell lines is sufficient to generate a strain that successfully infects and transmits between humans. But I would argue that it is almost certainly not sufficient to explore the full mutation space and gravitate toward a fitness maximum. That will only happen with massive series-parallel evolution among quadrillions of viruses in millions of hosts, i.e. in an actual pandemic. If I had to guess I would say that Delta represents that pinnacle and that mutations from here on out will likely favor immune evasion at the cost of fitness/virulence.
I smell J.Couey in this argument and I think you would be right sir ;)
Yes - absolutely.
Agree, as far as "real" increases to virulence goes. But spontaneous increases potentially driven by host and intermediary (microbiome + environment) changes are still always on the table.
Viruses become successful when they choose a replication target with specific characteristics which appear to indicate unnatural actions by the hosts. This one targets those who have chosen lifestyles contrary to our evolution, and have become unhealthy. Nature punishes renegades. Maybe a constructive outcome will be for more people to learn and adopt more natural lifestyles.
Viruses never get all of us, just a few. Important to learn what they did wrong, and don't do that.
It seems to me that a better model for a "novel" pathogen in the human population would be an initial worsening as the pathogen optimizes itself to infect and spread between humans, followed by a decline in virulence driven both by selective pressure on the virus (to have less-sick mobile hosts out and about transmitting) and immune evasion mutation pressure from the host (with most immune-evasion mutations also moving the virus away from a fitness optimum in terms of infectivity). The 1918 pandemic followed a similar pattern.
If we haven't completely messed things up with mass deployment of novel vaccines, we should be moving into the declining phase, with Omicron likely representing immune evasion at the cost of lower virulence.
For modern commentators, SARS-1 is supposed to be the model - rapid, early evolution as the virus acclimates. But then why did the virus "acclimate" itself out of existence / into other animals? I've never looked into the alleged gene tree. The whole thing never passed the "not just everyone's imagination" smell test at the time and still doesn't.
Which leads to another explanation which I didn't include because it was so redundant it would have rendered the post incoherent - "the virus" as mass hysteria (an obvious possibility from the start, given the reaction to the media theatre in March 2020; also covered by the recent post at https://chriswaldburger.substack.com/p/was-covid-a-quantum-event ; but perhaps best covered at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania).
So... sometimes the mass hysteria takes a second year to launch, and then it has "burned out." 1968 and 2020 both had huge political distractions that might have numbed the first round from reaching critical mass.
Back to reality, it's still important to notice that my "second year" example still has the mirror built in. So it can simultaneously be true that the "axiom" is correct and that SARS-CoV-2 "became more virulent" as observed in reality. But a "tune up, then tune down" model is certainly plausible.