On Survival of the Fittest and Natural Selection

Mister Node, who believed access to information was important, had always been an important driving force of this blog. When he woke up today, he found for the first time in a while an idea in his head that felt like an insufflation he had germinated yesterday and that he would have almost immediately forgotten had he not had the blog. About that later.

The first question that arose was about the blog itself. He had been working on it for a while now and had written and saved over 100 pieces – was that helpful? When he browsed through the blog, he not only liked the archiving by category, but also that through the search function he could quite effectively access what he indeed no longer had directly available.

The insufflation was about how much the template concept of survival of the fittest could spoil the art hidden in the discovery of Darwin (natural selection), at least for Mister Node. Survival evokes the image of the individual who uses his strength and intelligence to withstand the threats of a situation; selection evokes the image of a hereditary carrier that can vary per generation, and which has the better chance of survival if it has made enough copies of itself in its environment. DNA and RNA are hereditary carriers. They occur in individuals, but their identity determines the species, not the individual. And the success of the species is determined by the number of individuals alive and carrying the species identity.

Covid-19 and homo sapiens are both species. Covid supposedly lived modestly in wild animals for some time, say bats. Coincidentally, a jump was made to a human and the virus, as a species, appeared to thrive on and in humans, especially in their respiratory systems.

I speak to Nobody when I speak about the virus because it is a species and not an individual. Homo sapiens appears to be primarily focusing on the survival of individuals. Planning and adapting our own hereditary material in order to keep out Covid and the like is a bridge too far (hubris, hubris). So we have to do with the possibilities we find to spoil the environment of Covid (us) for Covid.

What seems to get in our way is our own hereditary material, which empowers us with desires and talents for social contact. As far as we know now, that (at least its physical variety) is beneficial for Covid-19.