• EDITORIAL •
SAVING OUR LIVES
Viruses may be primitive—but they do a lot of experiments and adapt fast. Could we learn a thing or two from them? BY DAVID HOLT
T
© ISTOCK / WILDPIXEL
he biosphere is a fancy word for the container that contains all the life on Earth. After 4.5 billion years of evolution, it’s unimaginably complex. So far, a total of 1.3 million species have been identified, out of a basket of between 5.3 million to 1 trillion. This extreme range exists partly because the border between life and nonlife is not so clear—and so is the definition of species. Microbes alone can be divided into six major types: bacteria, archaea, fungi, protozoa, algae, and
viruses. Most scientists don’t Now we cover the globe. We consider viruses a life form. get around quickly via air, Others disagree. and we spread information and disinformation even We humans lie at the other faster, via the internet. Our end of the evolutionary brains, however, still operate scale. We’re pretty smart, like those of our Stone up to a point. Tools have Age ancestors. We prefer made us apex predators, numbers of a few hundred but physically we’re not at most and we’re terrible at that imposing. As the spotting exponential trends. historian Yuval Noah Harari We like stuff we can see, points out, it’s our ability from an ant to a mountain, to organize, including our and timelines of a few days use of language, that has or weeks—years at the made us so dominant. outside. Even worse, the less But only over the last few we know about something, thousand years, a drop in the more confident we are the evolutionary bucket. about our opinions.
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