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> it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect That sound's like it's giving some kind of agency to the pathogen
by groestl 4y ago
> it’s generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect
That sound's like it's giving some kind of agency to the pathogen ;) when in fact it's more like: everyone that's severly infected isolates or dies, so the more harmless variants of the pathogen can replicate faster.
- originalcopying 4y agoit's merely a different way to lay down the explanations. it's not "in fact" like you say; you merely provide an alternative way to understand what's going on and to describe it. it's incorrect to claim that either is wrong because of the other. in the end, we gotta learn to have multiple ways to explain the same things and it's best to shift between these 'theories' of what is going on as it serves our purposes. It's stupid to have this alternatives "fighting each other"; see? I just have agency to the ways to conceptualize, understand, and explain phenomena.
- Silverback_VII 4y agoWhen it comes to viruses, I think it is important to understand that they simply replicate because they can. The virus has no interest in keeping you alive or killing you; it just infects cells and that’s it.
- Waterluvian 4y agoIt’s just an abstraction used to ease the conversation. If a disease is inclined to behave like X, that’s just a shortcut to say, “it’s evolutionarily advantageous if the mutations result in X behaviour.”
- kyleyeats 4y agoPrions are so hyper-intelligent that they've even hacked this "the host dying kills you too" problem.