Opportunities For Replication

Replications, replications,
Immune reactions,
Airborne dispersion,

Replications, replications,
Unlimited supply,
Of opportunities for replication;

Environment,
Genetic code,
Gene expression,
—All factors in determining how often little pieces of DNA are reproduced;

The genes which just happen to give their parent organism a greater chance of reproducing,
In the environment in which the organism finds itself,
Are necessarily more likely to be reproduced in the present moment;

It’s that simple,
The process doesn’t look ahead,
It can’t say— well, look,
If we wait…until, by chance…the side-effects of our infecting a host have become less severe,
And then reproduce loads,
We’ll end up with more copies of ourselves in the longer-term;
No— the process happens in the moment and is therefore never ‘optimal’ over the longer-term,
—That is how evolution can lead to certain non-optimal oddities like the Giraffe’s laryngeal nerve;

Given enough time…
A virus will inevitably become less harmful in a population,
Because those variants which kill less hosts will therefore end up with more opportunities to reproduce;

However, severe host symptoms which don’t kill hosts are much less selected against,
So you may end up with less deaths,
But you can still expect to get ill, even severely ill,
So long as you recover…limping,
But alive;

Nothing is pre-ordained,
There’s no agenda,
It’s not ‘survival of the species’,
It’s not even ‘survival of the individual’,
The genes themselves aren’t even selfish,
Evolution is an indifferent, logical, statistical process,
As much as it is beautifully simple and capable of producing the most stunning results;

Replicating machinery,
Replication instructions,
Random changes to the replication instructions,
Time,
Are all that are required for evolution to be inevitable;

Human language has all these ingredients,
So also follows this inevitable logic;

And until a population has become largely infected,
There is in the moment still a ‘limitless’ supply of potential hosts,
So variants which kill off hosts are not so selected against,
—As much as variants which are more infectious than others are selected for;

Replications, replications,
Immune reactions,
Airborne dispersion,

Replications, replications,
Unlimited supply…
Of opportunities for replication.

Happy New Year!

🌪