It is a characteristic human trait to create panic at the slightest hint of a threat as the new variant of Omicron amply demonstrates. Humans look at the microworld composed of bacteria and viruses as essentially hostile, threatening their survival. The fight is always ‘on’ to suppress them and keep the humans at the top of the evolution charts. Nothing can be more foolish than this false sense of being at the pinnacle of evolution starting with the ‘lowly’ bacteria at the bottom as Lynn Marguilis and Dorion Sagan show in their fantastic book, ‘Microcosmos’. The microcosmos has been around for almost 4 billion years and are likely to go on for billions more. The horizontal transmission and mixing of genes are responsible for almost an infinite immortality of the species. The individual bacteria may divide but collectively, it is forever living. In fact, the rapid transfer of genetic material across the entire species almost calls for a definition of a global ‘super-organism’ instead of single units. Humans are perhaps one small way of spreading viruses or bacteria. They can do very well on their own without requiring human agency.
Constantly fed on the Darwinian concept of ‘survival of the fittest’, we are simply not aware, as Lynn Marguilis points out, that symbiosis too is a very important process in evolution. Life is a complicated web of interactions. The amazing fact of the human body is that only 10% of all our trillions of cells are ‘human’; 90% are bacterial cells. Not only that, the mitochondria in each cell are a foreign bacterium incorporated into all the eukaryotic cells at some remote time in the past which now helps in the utilisation of oxygen. Similarly, the chloroplasts in plant cells, vital in photosynthesis, is in all probability an incorporated bacterial DNA. Today, life depends on the ability to utilize oxygen, the most important source of which is plant life. An interesting speculation is consciousness itself may be because of the quantum jiggling of microtubules in the brain which in turn may be of spirochaetal origin! It is a humbling thought.
So, there is an entire paradigm shift from competition to co-operation in the process of evolution. Survival in strict Darwinian terms is fecundity, that is the amount of progeny one produces. In this regard, humans are distinctly at a disadvantage. The most rapid reproduction is in the bacteria which divide once every 20 minutes and the rapid exchange of DNA in a horizontal method ensures almost a super-organism spread across the globe. Viruses are not as hostile to the bacterial world as they are perhaps to the human cell. There are also some ideas theorizing that a major part of human DNA might be actually viral DNA incorporated again at different times in a remote past benefitting both the human body and the virus in a symbiotic relationship. The only thing which is popular about human reproduction is that it happens to be pleasurable, but apart from that, there are no survival advantages in the human mode of reproduction.
Anyway, the important thing is that can we be effective in really stopping the spread of viral and bacterial mutations by putative measures like travel restrictions? How much would a strategy of ‘complete elimination’, if such is ever possible, really going to help in our survival when ‘we’ are by ‘them’ mostly? The point is that bacteria and viruses have been mutating for billions of years and that is how they have survived and will survive long after we are gone. ‘Mutation’ is a big scare word for the media and generally give the connotation of some viruses or rogue laboratories out to get the humans (to make money out of vaccines or eliminate the population to begin a new world). Mutation is simply a matter of survival at a genetic level and happens all the time. Paradoxically, a mutant which is highly efficient in killing people does not lead to a pandemic at a global level. To cause a pandemic, a virus needs to be moderately pathogenic (that is, causing disease) but highly infective (spreading effectively between people). We should seek solutions to stay in harmony instead of making the entire microworld into a rogue nation. Panic at every detected mutation is perhaps a wrong way to deal with our survival as authors Briscoe and Aldersey-Williams describe in a must-read book ‘Panicology’.
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