Perhaps if we were not stuck with textbooks that taught genetics in Mendel's words, or evolution in Darwin's, it wouldn't be so hard to understand the emergency, virulence, and eventual resolution of a pandemic virus like the new swine flu. And perhaps if we had far better public science education, there wouldn't be so many diaries suggesting that the potential pandemic is an insidious terrorist or government plot. As it is, CDC and WHO have major jobs in public education as well as in public health this week.
Let's start here. Viruses aren't add ons to our genomes; in fact, they may be the origin of most of the metabolic functions in modern cells. Evolution doesn't always occur by mutations (copy/paste accidents) but at least as often by "deliberate" viral transposition (if you can anthropomorphize anything a virus does as deliberate.)
And pandemic viral infections have relatively predictable origins, courses, and eventual resolutions. It's all evolutionary biology (despite what Fundamentalists would have us believe.) Jump for easy review.
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