Re: TOT: my assistant

John Cartmell wrote:
In article <4dfa0abf8bjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, John Cartmell
<john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <dt0qji$4id$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Bill Wright
<insertmybusinessname@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Oh well, he's a good lad really. On the way home he asked one of
those stupid questions that younger kids sometimes ask that
actually aren't stupid at all, and I was stuck for a reply. "Why do
viruses always make us ill? Why don't they mutate into something
that makes us feel better than normal?"

In any case the viruses don't directly make us ill - the illness
comes from our action in trying to get rid of them when they take
over our personal chemical factories (cells) in order to reproduce
themselves. That's the big problem with bird flu, as it induces a
massive over-reaction in which our defences are more likely to kill
ourselves than the invader.

That can be an element in viral illness, but it's by no means the full
story. Viruses are quite capable of making us ill on their own. That's
why we have an immune system to get rid of them! It would be a fairly
inept immune system that always made things worse.

Of course, the perfect virus wouldn't make us ill at all. It would
simply replicate itself in a benign fashion. There is a school of
thought that says we co-evolve with our viruses, and that these benign
viruses already exist - they are simply encoded in our DNA, and
reproduce themselves every time one of our cells divides. They have no
independent existence in the sense of normal viral particles, which have
been described as "bad news wrapped in protein".

The truly nasty viruses are the "emergent" strains - the ones which have
only recently encountered a new host species, and have yet to reach an
accomodation with it. Typically, these will have a natural host who will
tolerate their presence (killing your host is a bad career move). When a
new species is encountered, the sound thing to do in evolutionary terms
(if you are a virus) is to attack it, lest it threaten your own host
species, and hence your own survival.



.

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