- Life on earth has always been about species struggling to secure their odds of survival. A little known story, though, is the complex role that viruses have played in our evolution.
- Today, these microscopic bugs are among our biggest threats, especially the zoonotic kind like the novel coronavirus. We must constantly adapt to stay a step ahead of them.
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Twenty years ago, Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen, a brilliant and seamy proposition of how human behaviour has evolved in order to help protect the survival of our species. Ridley theorizes, with support from every corner of the animal kingdom—from water fleas to aphids, from guppies to peacocks and from cockerels to chimpanzees—that human beings are locked in a race for survival like Lewis Carroll’s character, the Red Queen.
To enhance their chance of survival, for instance, some bamboos flower only once every 121 years simultaneously worldwide and then die, killing their parasites with them. Female red finches choose the reddest male on offer as he is genetically more disease-resistant. The earliest civilizations were all ruled by emperors with large harems of women whose fertility was carefully observed, controlled and managed for the reproductive prolificity of their ruler.
Indeed, as we progressed from the paleolithic age, foraging for lean meats and berries, we randomly or intentionally (the verdict is still out) cultivated crops. The seed of civilization was planted. This is not a new theory and has been espoused by many, but Jared Diamond popularized this narrative for the lay person most strikingly if sensationally in his runaway 1997 success of a book, Guns, Germs and Steel.
As human beings settled down to an agricultural life with food aplenty, they domesticated animals. Living in groups of large human settlements resulted in the transmission of viruses such as smallpox, measles and influenza from domesticated animals to us. The Old World, having periodically been ravaged by these diseases from time immemorial (smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies), was largely conferred immunity, unlike New World populations that were decimated by these infections after Europeans landed on their shores.
So then, what does evolutionary biology tell us about viruses? As Carl Zimmer puts it, we are literally living on A Planet of Viruses. For one, human beings are greatly outnumbered by them. The ocean alone holds viruses that would extend for 42 million light years if they were all in a line.
Viruses are also much older than us. In a cave in Mexico, 26 million year-old crystals were found to be teeming with viruses. Above all, we have been shaped by them. About 8% of our DNA consists of endogenous retroviruses.
A retrovirus called ERV-L that lurks in our genome dates back to 100 million years ago, and is now found in armadillos, elephants, manatees and humans. Another such virus called HERV-W actually makes syncytin, a protein critical to providing nutrition in the placenta. When it first infected the common ancestor of mammals, it was possibly responsible for evolving the very first placenta.
While this paints a somewhat rosy picture of our symbiotic relationship with viruses, the truth is less rosy. Viruses are our greatest existential threat, with smallpox killing close to 300 million people, measles 200 million and polio around 25 million people in the 20th century alone. Influenza, HIV, Ebola, SARS, MERS, H1N1 and of course SARS-COV2 are just a few of the viruses that have plagued us.
Staggering advances in science have led to vaccines and treatments for many of these. The past year has been a testament to the astonishing success of human beings to rapidly decode the genome and produce multiple vaccines for SARS-COV2.
But as our population continues to grow, and as we brush up against and further encroach upon the habitats of every other species, novel viral epidemics are going to become more common. Unlike smallpox and polio, these so-called zoonotic diseases are virtually impossibly to eradicate as they can be borne by other species.
As David Quammen, author of Spillover, writes of zoonotic diseases: “Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.”
As we ponder our fate in 2021, we would do well to think of our evolutionary history and the principles of the Red Queen. We may have evolved into apes with large brains, but we somehow seem blissfully unaware of our fate. Those who don’t adapt will not survive. And those who do adapt may find it takes “all the running you can do to keep in the same place”.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.