So a lot of RL stuff has happened here – I’ve been tested for and found clear of COVID-19, the living room has been moved through 90 degrees and several perturbations, I’ve gone from being stressed to being elated to being physically stressed to being panicked again now because my COPD has been exacerbated by the exertion and I’m currently very dyspnoeic.
I find there’s a special place in hell I’d l’d like to see reserved for (and very quickly to be occupied by please) a handful of people in the world, the people who began to think that accumulating wealth for the sake of having wealth rather than just being content with having enough, the people who educated generations of us to be ruled by greed rather than need, abstract wealth rather than resources.
By now it must be obvious how contrived and stretched the concept of money has become. No intrinsic value whatsoever, and therefore it can be arbitrarily assigned any damn value (or lack thereof) that you want. Perfect for stealing land, plants, and animals from one another. Because when you come down to it, those are the only things that constitute wealth.
And just lately I’ve had a small epiphany: wealth had had to be created in order to generate progress. Progress had to be created because with enough progress and wealth, you can reshape the world. And the world needs to be reshaped because the concepts of wealth and progress have ruined it…
And I think we may be at the reset button stage. Bear with me:
There’s a biological imperative in us, to survive. On this planet, with its complex life which selects for success using genetics, this means the drive within us is actually an imperative for our specific DNA to survive. For our specific DNA to survive we’d have to be prokaryotic, that is, to reproduce by splitting into two at intervals. The advantage of that is that our specific DNA will continue unscathed (other than from a stray mutation introduced by a cosmic ray strike along one branch) forever.
The disadvantage is that we’d still be stuck at the prokaryote single cell stage.
And so we became gendered multicellular eukaryotes – no longer was it just one cell’s worth of DNA that was of concern. What originally was just a blueprint for a single celled critter had some serious scope creep and became the DNA that specified the various and differentiated clusters of cells that functioned together to survive on the planet.
And if being a five cell sessile fungus conferred some serious powers on that cluster because those five cells each specialised in one activity each and made it possible to survive better and thrive, then being a million cell mobile animalcule was even better. You could eat the fungus after it had done the work of digesting minerals and food compounds for you.
Trouble was, how did you get there? How did you get to become an animal (or at least a very mobile vegetable with a taste for fellow vegetables) from a single celled animal that never changed its structure because each generation was a clone of the last?
The answer of course was sex. With sex, you could take two ‘almost-prokaryotes’ that were not identical, smush them together, and squeeze the two strands of DNA together, discarding randomly chosen segments of one or the other parent cells and ending up with a new DNA strand that had bits from both parents. You could then watch the new cell either thrive and find another cell to get sexy with, or give two twitches and die. Two thriving cells could then do the old DNA Strand Shuffle and maybe find The Next Big Thing, the killer app of critterhood.
And that neatly explains why sex is still one of the most powerful drivers of our actions. It works to refine successful creatures into more successful creatures. And introduces a new problem: Stability.
If you’re a fairly successful critter, you want your DNA to continue. YOUR DNA. Not the rest of your species, not your DNA and your sexual partner’s. Yours. And that defeats the purpose of having sex and genetices because then you could just split like those first prokaryotes, and no further evolution would take place.
We’re stuck with those traits and drivers, they’re encoded in our DNA to ensure that our DNA keeps going. We’re unfortunately not saddled with a segment of DNA that tries to manage our DNA in concert with others of our species for the best survival of the species. That happens as an accidental byproduct, where two wolves in concert can bring down a prey animal between them more often than the same two wolves acting separately. Gradually, a bit of cooperative hunting creeps onto the long DNA strand for the species.
But the eventual aim of DNA is to be the ONLY DNA on the planet. Which is bad news for biodiversity. Eventually, There Can Only Be One.
But we did get the cooperative gene thanks to the fact that it’s useful. For making computers and the Internet, among other things. And for creating and signing petitions, and finding ways to con ‘wealth’ out of our fellow critters because, you know, OUR DNA still really wants to be The One…
So one of the things our DNA wants is for the species to be wildly successful, and we can see that it has been. But not too successful if you please. Don’t forget that evolution has resulted in species like the bees, where the whole hive is super – intelligent. And species like some fungi that can take over a host animal and make that animal into a humidicrib for future fungi… Evolution got there.
Rats have a DNA supermechanism that prevents overpopulation. They start to abandon their young, fight and kill one another, eat crap food that kills them, and spend most of their days in a stupor. The population declines rapidly, and the remaining rats go back to normal.
Grasshoppers, when they rub other grasshopper’s legs too often in passing, swarm and become a voracious locust. Once the temporary madness ends and they’re once again spread far enough apart to no be longer brushing legs with their fellows x times a a minute, they just go about being grasshoppers again.
Now imagine humans. Our population has exploded, we’re brushing legs with our fellows all the time. Thanks to the Internet, we can even virtually brush legs with thousands of our fellows. What overpopulation switches have we got built into our DNA?
Because now I see all those super-wealthy individuals have all built ultimate social isolation hideaways in various places around the world. The kind you can go into, close the door behind you for a year or two, then come out to a world empty of the overpopulation problem.
And I see conflicting and unsubstantiated reports about COVID-19 and SARS-cov-2. You seem to recover but your immune system is left damaged, your lungs are left damaged. You seem to recover but you can catch it again, no immunity. It’s mutated several times since leaving Wuhan, but it’s still the same. (Of course, viruses mutate EVERY time they multiply but it’s generally the ‘noise DNA’ so it makes little difference to the disease they cause.)
The more of that, the more you begin to realise that we may be facing the very enemy that all those hideaways are designed for… You have to stay isolated for either as long as it takes all the SARS-cov-2 virus in the world to make that one genetic change that renders it impotent against us (could take years) or you have to stay isolated until all those infected have died from it, and SARS-cov-2 itself has decayed to inviable RNA dust in every spot where we can come into contact with it.
And that’s why I say we’re going to be isolating until all those idiot rah-rah-rah halfwits that want to just go about life as normal and don’t really believe that COVID-19 will kill you, until those idiots are dead and incinerated.
Here’s a novel prediction, Donny The Orange Low-IQ Shitstain will realise this very soon, and start drone-striking the COVID deniers. If not him, some very intelligent kid behind the controls of a strike drone when the realisation hits them. If not that, then some prepper who repels a suspected infectee using lethal means. Because once you realise that SARS-cov-2 is an implacable foe that we probably can’t eliminate and that will leave us weakened and vulnerable to the next virus or kill us over several bouts, shit may get serious enough for some people to not wait until the virus has burned itself out.