Viruses are active agents, existing within rich lifeworlds. A safe future depends on understanding this evolutionary story.
Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and subtle
relationships, then translate them into what others recognise as good judgment.
If it comes to us at all, wisdom is the product of reflection, time and
experience. A person might achieve wisdom after decades; a community after
centuries; a culture after millennia. Modern human beings as a species? We’re
getting there, and pandemics can help. If we persist in our curiosity and
reflect on what we find, and if we survive the waves of disease to come, the
wisdom of pandemics will come to us. Perhaps as soon as a few centuries from
now.
Pandemics are both
deeply immediate and empirically long-lasting, symbolised by the Greek gods of
time, including the unbounded Aion and the temporal Chronos, who ruled over
past, present and future. Although we’re improving our abilities to understand
each aspect separately, the challenge is bringing them together. Consider, for
instance, the protracted history and arc of the 2020 pandemic caused by the
coronavirus SARS-CoV-2.
In 1887, as part of
its invasion of what is now Eritrea in the Horn
of Africa, Italy shipped cattle over from India to feed its troops. Some of
those cattle were carrying the virus that causes rinderpest, known historically
among Europeans as cattle plague. The virus attacks even-toed ungulates, and is
nearly always fatal. Informed by the mythology framing human relationships with
disease in terms of war, the British tried to stop the spread of rinderpest
with fences and guns. A decade later, the virus had swept through the
immunologically naive populations of sub-Saharan Africa, killing almost 90
per cent of all the cattle, as well as oxen, sheep, buffalo, wildebeest
and giraffes.
Rinderpest was
successfully eradicated, worldwide, in 2011, primarily using that peaceful tool
called vaccination. Nevertheless, its impacts continued.
In the wake of the
initial devastation in Africa, few animals were left to herd, to plough fields
or to hunt; a third of the people in Ethiopia, and two-thirds of the Maasai,
starved to death. With the loss of grazing animals, the landscape was invaded
and colonised by thorn bush. This provided poor feed for cattle, but excellent
habitat for tsetse flies, which transmit trypanosomes, the single-celled
parasites that cause animal and human sleeping sickness. Mortality from
sleeping sickness rose dramatically.
In his landmark
studies, the Soviet zoologist Yevgeny Pavlovsky described the ways in which
human pathogens, particularly those of animal origin, are embedded in the
ecological webs of particular landscapes; writing in 1966, he called this
embeddedness ‘the natural nidality of transmissible disease’. In sub-Saharan
Africa, for instance, trypanosomes were not the only tiny organisms whose
nidality included cycling between local arthropods and mammals. The African
swine fever virus (ASFV) had also for centuries passed between soft-bodied
ticks and wild pigs, though without causing much discomfort in either.
In any event, after
losing their livestock to rinderpest, British colonists imported large numbers
of domestic pigs from the Seychelles and England. The pigs were raised
freerange. This solution to a food problem through importation was followed,
not long afterwards, by outbreaks of African swine fever (ASF) in the domestic
pigs, in which the disease is almost always fatal. Over the next century,
sporadic outbreaks were reported not only in Africa, but in various European
and Caribbean countries. In each instance, the disease was controlled by
killing all the pigs on farms where the disease was diagnosed. In 2020, there
is still no treatment and no vaccine.
In 2018, ASFV
appeared in Southeast and East Asia, including China. Chinese investigators
suggested that the virus came from Russia. Russia asserted that the virus
probably arrived in China through pork products from the European Union, or
perhaps from somewhere in Africa. Whatever its source, ASFV, which persists in
pork products, feeds and in the environment, spread rapidly across the country.
Over the next two years, half the pigs in China – more than 200 million – died
or were killed to stamp out ASF.
In the lead up to
Chinese New Year, tens of millions of Chinese people were shopping for meat to
celebrate the end of the lunar Year of the Pig and launch of the Year of the
Rat.
With pigs in short
supply, the entrepreneurial market vendors at Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan
were reportedly ready with meat from other species, including peacocks, wild
rabbits, snakes, deer, crocodiles, turkeys, swans, kangaroos, squirrels,
snails, foxes, pheasants, civets, ostriches, camels, cicadas, frogs, roosters,
doves, centipedes, hedgehogs and goats. It is from this chaotic mix of colonial
invasions and naive, semiregulated global trade that, in late 2019, SARS-CoV-2
(the virus) and COVID-19 (the disease) emerged.
A few months later,
in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of the 19th-century colonial
invasion into Africa came full circle. Measles virus had emerged as a mutation
from the rinderpest virus somewhere between 500 BC and 1000 CE (the exact date
being in dispute). Like rinderpest, measles is preventable through vaccination,
and is similarly vulnerable to eradication. In 2020, even as politicians and
public health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) struggled to
respond to the new COVID-19 pandemic, they were faced with what one might call ‘The
Son of Rinderpest’. In 2019 and 2020, almost 7,000 people in the DRC died of
measles.
SARS-CoV-2 is a novel
virus, but the story of its emergence is not novel. Similar narratives can be told of bubonic plague,
cholera, yellow fever, Ebola and many others. From these, one can learn how to
respond more effectively to the next pandemic – physical distancing, use of
masks, testing and diagnosing, tracing, vaccinating if possible, isolating if
not. This is necessary. But beyond tactical and technical lessons, or jeremiads
about colonial history, is there wisdom to be gained?
Yes, if we open our
minds. We don’t usually associate the intellectually ‘soft’ idea of wisdom with the ‘hard’ ideas of natural
science. This sharp demarcation between science and understanding is by design.
In the 17th century, in the midst of devastating religious wars, René Descartes
wrote a Discourse on Method, a set of guidelines designed to enable
people to explore and understand the physical world in a deeper way. He argued
that ‘there being but one truth for each thing, anyone who finds it knows as
much as one can know about that thing’ and that, in approaching complex
problems, he found it useful ‘to divide each of the difficulties I examined
into as many parts as possible and as required in order to resolve them
better.’ His advice formed the basis for much of what we know, and celebrate,
about what Thomas Kuhn in 1962 called ‘normal science’.
In this tradition,
when attempting to understand pandemics, most research scholars and
practitioners focus on the immediately observable details. In the midst of a
catastrophic outbreak of disease, when one is looking for clues to enable
effective prevention and control, this focus is understandable and necessary.
The Cartesian
approach has brought us to the stage where we can quickly and efficiently study
all the ‘things’ that make up a pandemic – organisms, species, genomes, viral
structures, biological characteristics of those people or animals who are
infected and die, and those who are infected and live. This is important for
designing tests, public health protocols, vaccines and pharmaceutical
treatments. For the long-term struggle to acquire wisdom, however, a
single-minded, thing-focused science offers little help.
Faced with the
complex social and ecological interactions from which pandemics emerge, many
‘normal scientists’, like the Auditors in Terry Pratchett’s novel Thief
of Time (2001), are stymied. The Auditors, having broken down great
paintings into their constituent molecules, are unable to understand why people
respond to art with such deep feelings. Faced with pandemics, we – like
Pratchett’s Auditors – can only declare, somewhat lamely, that pandemics are
caused by novel viruses, that is, that ‘we have discovered a new thing under
the Sun’.
Bubonic plague has
now emigrated and made itself at home around the world. This is also true of
SARS-CoV-2
In an interview in
May 2020, the physician Ali Khan, former director of the Office of Public
Health Preparedness and Response at the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, was asked what had gone ‘so disastrously’ wrong with the global
response to COVID-19. ‘Was it a lack of scientific information, or a lack of
money?’ asked the interviewer.
‘This is about lack
of imagination,’ Khan replied.
Khan’s reply seems wise,
but also unsatisfying. What is it – apart from science fiction dystopias – that
we might imagine? Historically, wisdom emerges within particular cultures, and
is often associated with elders and sages who have long-lived experience of how
to survive, and thrive, in particular places. Pavlovky’s observations on the
‘natural nidality’ of diseases fit into this perspective.
In the 21st century,
our understanding of pandemics challenges and alters this traditional view of
natural nidality. Bubonic plague, once quietly circulating among marmots and
fleas in the Mongolian steppe, has now emigrated and made itself at home around
the world. This is also true, now, of ASFV and SARS-CoV-2, which most of us
will have to find ways to accommodate.
If we attempt to carry
traditional notions of wisdom across cultural and temporal borders, from wise
individuals in communities and wise elders in local cultures, and bring, for
instance the wisdom of ‘the East’, or of ‘the ancients’ (perhaps the Greeks),
to 21st-century Europe or North America, we’re often left with a handful of
commonplace, well-worn aphorisms, variations on themes of ‘everything is
connected to everything else’ or ‘think globally, act locally’.
If the natural
niduses of pandemics are now scattered around the whole world, is there a
wisdom equal to the task? As Khan implies, normal science is insufficient to
offer us guidance for how to move from conventional, local knowledge, to
grappling with such globally complex, wicked problems. Can pandemics themselves
be a source of wisdom, offering insights into how we might embrace normal,
thing-focused science, and yet see beyond it to the inner qualities and
relationships among things?
Some authors have
used grand narratives, weaving together humanities and natural sciences, to
offer insights into the origins and impacts of pandemic diseases. Hans
Zinsser’s Rats, Lice and History (1935) and William
McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976) explored the social and
biological causes of pandemics and speculated about their influence on human
evolution and history. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
went a step beyond this, giving epidemic diseases a central role in his
revision of human migrations and animal domestication from prehistoric times to
the present. In this tradition, Walter Scheidel in The Great Leveler (2017) argued that catastrophic epidemics were one
of the few events – along with mass-mobilisation warfare, violent revolutions
and state collapse – sufficiently powerful to flatten disparities in income and
wealth.
What has been
marginalised in these narratives, as well as in natural and medical sciences in
general, is an understanding of the patterns of relationships and, for lack of
a better word, ‘conversations’, that hold the world together and from which
pandemics emerge. These nested, world-embracing conversations are expressed
through chemicals, magnetic forces, broad spectrums of radiation, gravity, small
and weak nuclear forces, mycelia, visible and invisible ecological webs.
The usual narratives
have, if not a common language, at least an assumption that we have reliable
ways to translate, across all the interacting, nested scales, between the many
perspectives and conversations around us. Digging deeply into unbounded time,
physicists have suggested that mathematics be considered a protolanguage, a
Rosetta Stone or Babel fish to translate among the many languages in the
Universe. We might learn a great deal about pandemics through mathematical
modelling, but even the physicist Stephen Hawking, were he alive, would admit
we have fallen short. Writing in A Brief History of Time (1988),
he asked:
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe
for them to describe? … Why does the Universe go to all the bother of existing?
… if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in
broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all,
philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the
discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.
But what if the very
notion of such a theory is the problem? Is it possible to look beyond the
shifting visions of landscape ecology and mathematical models to understand the
inner workings of the biosphere itself?
In their paper ‘We Need to Talk (More Wisely) About
Wisdom: A Set of Conversations About Wisdom, Science, and Futures’ (2019),
Rafael Ramirez, director of the Oxford Scenarios Programme, and his three
co-authors, argue that wisdom ‘includes practices which embrace uncertainty,
ignorance and complexity’, is demonstrated in action, and is ‘only meaningfully
assessable from the future’. They suggest that a way forward would include
‘post-normal science, scenario planning, and courageous conversations’.
At first glance,
these three suggestions appear to be a sort of yogic meditation for scientists.
While none of them explicitly offer a language for achieving wisdom,
‘post-normal science’ proposes something new – that to properly understand the
complex and uncertain world in which we dwell, and to make wise decisions, we
will need to acknowledge and accommodate multiple legitimate perspectives. For
pandemics, the concept implies that wisdom will come only when we expand our
peer community to include other species.
One might begin with
macroscopically visible and economically important organisms such as
arthropods. While Cartesian science has enabled us to classify arthropods,
we’ve rarely examined the chemical grammar of their languages beyond what we
need to spy on their world, and to kill them. Only occasionally do we grapple
with how dung beetles orient in a landscape using the stars, or migrating
butterflies respond to magnetism. If, as the Baltic-German biologist Jakob von
Uexküll proposed in the mid-20th century in his pioneering work on the Umwelt of
nonhuman animals, we could begin to understand how other animals sense their
interactions with us and our shared world, we might open possibilities that go
beyond theories and models constructed from a science of things to pandemic
wisdom itself.
‘Viruses are one of
the most dominant drivers of evolutionary change’
Pandemics appear to
us in the form of rogue bacteria or viruses, but what do we know of the
invisible world around us from which they arrive? Rather than focusing only on
identifying and classifying fungi, bacteria, plants, animals, nucleotides,
amino acids and viruses, we might query the important roles that these things
have played as active characters in the larger narratives of evolution and
life. In their provocative book Microcosmos (1986), Lynn
Margulis and Dorion Sagan reframed the evolution of multicellular organisms
such as humans as bacterial symbiosis – bacteria literally combined, they
hypothesised, to form the cells comprising us today.
Researchers since
then have uncovered evidence that pathogens exert ‘the strongest selective
pressure to drive the evolution of modern humans’. Among the drivers, look to
evidence that prehistoric pandemics played a role in selecting for ancestral
traits and behaviours that we recognise as human today. Scientists following
another thread in this evolutionary narrative describe viral nucleic acids
insinuating themselves into our genetic codes. The biologist David Enard at
Stanford University in California and colleagues have concluded that
‘viruses are one of the most dominant drivers of evolutionary change across
mammalian and human proteomes’.
Microbial populations
work together to accomplish the feat. Indeed, the biologists Bonnie Bassler and
Steven Rutherford at Princeton University in New Jersey describe quorum
sensing, in which bacterial populations coordinate group behaviour. Bassler’s
research with Kai Papenforth reveals how
bacteria share information and converse with each other and with the world they
inhabit – including ourselves.
Building on this,
other scholars have argued that the ‘microbial microcosm is a
compelling narrative that situates our human biome in the biome of the planet,
and in doing so, provides a common language to bridge efforts across and between
movements, humans, and our natural environments.’ This globalises Pavlovsky’s
concept of natural nidality and, in so doing, changes our understanding of
ourselves as biological beings in this world.
Grounded in European
traditions of natural science and medicine, the American etymologist Lewis
Thomas in 1987 reflected that:
for all our elegance and eloquence as a species, for all our massive
frontal lobes, for all our music, we have not progressed all that far from our
microbial forebears. They are still with us, part of us. Or, put it another
way, we are part of them.
Complementing and
extending this, the health scientist and Torres Strait islander Kerry Arabena
has drawn on her Indigenous heritage to ponder what it might mean to see
ourselves as being ‘Indigenous to the Universe’. She defines this as ‘a living practice, a way of
life’ that acknowledges reciprocal relationships among all species and the
landscapes in which we dwell.
As we become more
deft at exploring the nested, dynamically complex relationships among viruses,
bacteria, fungi and ourselves, we’ll come closer to grasping how pandemics
emerge from a rupturing and rearranging of these relationships. From this deep
linking of Aion with Chronos, we can already see the outlines of the wisdom
that pandemics offer us. What we’re beginning to faintly understand is this: if
we wish to survive as a species, we must gather all of our knowledge from
multiple perspectives – however fragmented and partial – and actively engage in
conversations with the world we inhabit and that gives us life. Only then will
we begin to understand ourselves, and live up to our name, the wise ones, Homo
sapiens sapiens.
https://aeon.co/essays/viruses-are-not-just-threats-but-actors-in-evolutions-long-story
