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It’s a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the twenty-first century.
about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and
By the cold Darwinian logic of natural selection, evolution codifies happenstance into strategy.
Ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree, and things fall out.
Any such spillover in the reverse direction—from humans to a nonhuman species—is known as an anthroponosis.
Because viruses are vanishingly minuscule, simple but ingenious, anomalous, economical, and in some cases fiendishly subtle.
Darwinian natural selection. They evolve. The viruses on Earth today are well fit for what they do because only the fittest have survived.
Evolution lowers virulence, tending toward that “more perfect mutual tolerance” between pathogen and host.
In reality the virulence of a parasite “is usually coupled with the transmission rate and with the time taken to recover by those hosts for whom the infection is not lethal.”
It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg problem, he said. RNA viruses are limited to small genomes because their mutation rates are so high, and their mutation rates are so high because they’re limited to small genomes. In fact, there’s a fancy name for that bind: Eigen’s paradox.
They don’t come after us. In one way or another, we go to them.
