This month’s Discover Magazine “20 Things You Don’t Know About a …” series features viruses. I thought this one was particularly interesting, as it gives a peek into non-living organisms and evolution.
The article just came out, so it’s not available to read online. But here are two of twenty facts you don’t know about viruses.
The #1 thing you don’t know about viruses is:
Viruses are not alive. They do not have cells, they cannot turn foods into energy, and without a host they are just inert packets of chemicals.
The #2 thing you don’t know about viruses is:
Viruses are not exactly dead, either: they have genes, they reproduce and they evolve through natural selection.
The scary part to a creationist might be the last part (“they evolve through natural selection.”) Try to remove that from your mind if that bothers you. Instead, concentrate on the first part: Viruses have genes and they reproduce and a virus is not alive.
It doesn’t consume any kind of “food” to burn for energy. It doesn’t have a “mind”, and yet it successfully exists to replicate, and to infect you so badly with itself, that you are knocked off your feet for sometimes days. It doesn’t have a mind, yet it successfully infects millions, then it uses its non-brain to replicate in a way that the next time it gets you, your immune system can’t defeat it fast enough.
The way I understand evolution and the beginning of life (abiogenesis), and many of my readers can correct me, is that there were chemical processes that created a type of lifeless particle. This lifeless particle replicated through chemical means. The particles grew in size and complexity. And poof, us. Magic, right? No, this process continued and continued over and over. And complexity arose out of simplicity.
The creationist/Intelligent design “theory” of Irreducible Complexity has been debunked time after time. Science shows that simple does beget complex. An organism that appears to have suddenly popped into existence — as the bible explains — turns out to have a simpler predecessors.
This is a pedestrian and relatively ignorant explanation, I know. I really wanted to throw out there that there is evidence among us that non-living things can replicate, “live” among us, and cause such havoc.
You have to agree that viruses are amazing little beasts. They’re so amazing that they can fell the strongest man or woman alive. All this without a brain.
When I read about these things, it makes sense. It makes sense that non-life can replicate itself, grow in complexity, and become the simple celled organisms that gave rise to multicellular organisms. Hence why Dawkins says, in “The Greatest Show on Earth,” we went from simple sperm and egg to a baby in 9 months. If a baby can do it, why is it so difficult that over the course of millions of years, these things started happening in nature? Once the process is in place, it becomes standard fare and seemingly easily done.
If something so simple as a non-living virus can be so miniscule and complex at the same time … If it can reproduce so fast as to out-speed your body’s immune system and find yet another way to infect it with virtual petri dish of viral breeding grounds … Only to cause you to sneeze, wipe your nose, open a door and have your wife open that same door, wipe her eye, and blam … she’s sick too. And these things are all explicable by natural selection and science, and you still believe that god did it, what in the world is wrong with you?
Maybe to you, when you read the bible, and there’s a talking snake, a tree of life and women made from ribs, it sounds completely reasonable to you.
And you think it’s crazy that I think complexity arose from simple.
If you believe the genesis story, please tell me one thing: Where’s the verse in the bible that explains god’s all-powerful knowledge of viruses?
Was the story of Jesus removing demons a metaphor for viral infection going from man to pig or did it validate the predominant ignorance of the day?
Don’t forget: Your body is a viral whore house.
I’m so thankful for my science education. It’s hard for me to remember back when I was a child, believing ancient mythology to explain this sort of stuff, thinking it was all too mysterious and complex for anything but the divine explanations of the preacher (why would the preacher lie?).
After the exchanges with the Pullman group, I could see an alternate version of me wanting so desperately to believe it that I put up a shield of excuses to never really absorb the information in those studies. How sad would that be? Forgoing all of the vast knowledge of our time to relegate oneself to a modern day Apollonian.
Viruses give such a wonderful insight into the cruel and indifferent chemistry going on at the most basic levels of life. But even they are too mysterious for those that reject science to explain without the mythology. Without understanding the physics behind the chemistry, and the chemistry behind the smallest units of animated matter, let alone fully understanding the symphony of chemistry in more complex organisms made up of those units or infected by them… it’s all too easy to chalk it up to divine mystery.
But you can only do so much to get people to give up their sworn allegiance to confirmation bias, especially when they believe it is ordained by ancient supreme beings. They may never snap out of it. They may never understand why them praying for someone’s infectious disease to go away is little different than trying to pray for different results with your chemistry set.
But it’s worse than that. They are so convinced that morality necessarily goes away at recognizing the sheer simplicity in animated matter. They don’t get to see grandma again. They’d have to define their own purpose. It horrifies them. They stand aghast at the notion. They’ve been taught so many angles to avoid reality that it seems hopeless to get through.
Maybe it is hopeless for some of them. I don’t know.