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This reminds me of a question I have asked of those with more biology knowledge and not gotten a satisfying answer: Would there be adverse outcomes if we someho
by mcculley 4y ago
This reminds me of a question I have asked of those with more biology knowledge and not gotten a satisfying answer: Would there be adverse outcomes if we somehow killed all viruses?
- pchristensen 4y agoI don't have the science background to tell you which adverse outcomes, but you can be assured that the answer is yes.
- mcculley 4y agoCan you elaborate on that? Or is it a gut feeling?
- maxbond 4y agoAlso unqualified but presumably similar to if you remove predators from an ecosystem; without negative feedback, fast replicating organisms get out of hand, biodiversity drops, eventually the ecosystem either crashes or evolves new feedback loops. Consider that, if you pick a type of organism or of a hat - it is probably a virus (eg, for each kind of cellular organism, there are many kinds of virus targeting that organism). Getting rid of all the viruses would cut biodiversity by more than half, just on it's own. That's pulling a lot of rivets out of your airplane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service#Ecology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_service#Ecology see redundancy hypothesis). Heres an article about depriving an ecosystem of predators: https://nautil.us/the-ecologist-who-threw-starfish-235831/ https://nautil.us/the-ecologist-who-threw-starfish-235831/