Niles Eldredge - The Darwin Blogs

The Darwin Blogs – January 26, 2006.

Americans, viruses and evolution.

We Americans love the fruits of all the clever engineering that has gone on since well before our lifetimes. I’m no exception—and I am still scanning the ads every week, anxious to find a hand-held device supported by a cell phone company that is capable of receiving, displaying, and sending back internet pages. My fantasy is to be able to search for—and occasionally bid on and buy—a 19th century French cornet on Ebay anywhere there is a cell phone signal.

And yes, it is true that I do not know how cell phones or computers actually work—not really. So I am not thinking that to be happy with our gadgets we need to understand exactly how they work.

But I DO think that if more Americans understood that, without a working knowledge of the evolutionary process, there would not be all the concern that has recently been raised about the possibility of a world-wide epidemic of Bird Flu. The subject comes up as I try to fight off the last vestiges of a bout with whatever the influenza virus (and it is not the one for which I received an inoculation!) is that floored my wife and me this past week. Nasty business. And, of course, Bird Flu is far nastier—with a human mortality rate of around 50%.

When we think of disease-causing viruses and bacteria in an evolutionary sense, we usually think of the sort of escalating warfare between drug treatments and the pathogen: we develop a promising drug—but somehow there are always some small subsets of the pathogen population that remain unaffected: there is genetic variation already present that confers immunity—and the more that drug is thrown at that pathogen, the sooner the drug loses its effectiveness as the genetically resistant strain survives and out-reproduces the strain that succumbs to the drug.

Bird-Flu presents us with an even richer evolutionary scenario: evidently, there is as yet no means for the virus to spread from one affected human being to another. So those of us who understand evolution are waiting with baited breath—for it is just a matter of time before a mutation will arise and present that new variation to the population—the newly minted ability for the virus to spread from human to human. A new virus will have just evolved. This is apparently what happened to kick off the world-wide epidemic influenza just after World War I that killed tens of millions of people.

Variation and selection are the stuff of evolution. Mutations are the ultimate source of variation. Without knowledge of evolution, it would never occur to anyone that a virus, adapted to live among birds, and recently found to sometimes infect humans upon direct contact, might very well change—evolve—and become our next worst enemy.

We mislead, ignore and downright lie to our children about evolution to the peril of us all.

I am happy to report that my letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review (see Blog #2, January 22) will be published in the Sunday, February 5, 2006 issue of the Times Book Review.

Niles Eldredge

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