Tuesday, March 6, 2012

The chicken or the egg

The centennial question: what came first, the chicken or the egg?   I am here tonight to conjecture that neither did.  It was the virus.  but Virus is SUCH A LOADED WORD that I am scared to even use it.  I must inform you of my definition of what a virus is before my stance can be understood.  Since Viruses have come into the limelight some 100 years ago, many other variations of them have been discovered.  And it seems their names change as they change in size.  some are called viroids or virims or plasmids or plasmoids or whatever.  It doesn't really matter to my arguement ( I have no idea what i am arguing though).

some quagillion years ago we weren't physically the way we are now.  we were extremely different.  suffice it to day we weren't human.  we weren't even our four-legged friends.  Lets just say we were an entity called bloogers.  So HOW THE HECKLES did we change from bloogers to hoomans?  simple.  first there was genetic diversity in the kinds of bloogers out there, and then natural selection chose which one it liked the most and let that one continue living.  This process continued for slamblagallilion years and now you have the product human.  simple right?  But please don't think that natural selection had any emotionally backed reason in choosing the lucky blooger.  GOODNESS NO!!!  Mr. NS loved everyone, but he just knew that one blooger was better fit for the environment wherein it resided and so he just let the environment be the stage and each blooger act out.  only the blooger which was the most pleasing to the crowd would continue on to the next stage.  (Now who is the crowd?  I don't know that one yet.  But I know there is a metaphor for it lying somewhere.)

So this blooger did well and progressed to the next stage.  and with each stage it had to change a little bit to be better adapted to the new stage.  And with each new adaption the blooger's phenotype changed more and more so at one point you could no longer call it a blooger because it looked nothing like the orignial blooger.  you had to give it a new name.  like blogger.  then blogger no longer fit because it phenotype too changed drastically from the orignial so it became a chogger, then chigger, then chicker, and finally chicken.

But WHAT CREATED THIS GENETIC DIVERSITY IN THE FIRST PLACE?  why are no two organisms alike?   There are various theories, the most commonly talked about one being the crossing over of genes during meiotic and mitotic division.  sometimes chunks of genes just willy nilly flip themselves in place.  but I want to talk about what I think is the most important yet most overlooked one.  It is the amazing feat that only one organism I know of can do.  It is that of splicing ones own DNA into that of anothers.  basically walking onto the stage and copying another bloogers performance perfectly while adding your own variation.  And this brings me to how I wanna define a virus, or whatever other name you wanna call it, because it is what can do this.  A virus can change the genetical makeup of another organism.  meaning that if before the organism had blue skin, theoretically the virus could give it purple.  (-DISCLAIMER-  this is a gross oversimplification)  Now that is CRAZY!!!!!  Viruses are like DNA engineers!!!!  We are lucky they don't have a waking conscious because imagine the crazyness a virus could concoct if it had an agenda!!!! "I want everyone to have rabbit ears, so I will just take this out and put this in and TADA!!!!"

My Brain takes me to here.  If a virus can change another organisms DNA, then it must have been the first DNA based organism ever.  and every living organism on this planet that is made up of DNA regardless to its complexity, is just an accumulation of mutual viral splicing, with the occasional crossing over mixed in (once organisms became complex enough to allow crossing over.).  AND SINCE it has been happening since the beginning, it is still happening now!!!!  MEANING viruses coming into our bodies ISN'T a "bad" thing.  They are just doing what they have been doing since forever, we just discovered it a little more than 100 years ago.

It just so happens that sometimes their DNA experiments aren't successful and our bodies try to correct their mistakes which, depending on how much the Virus changed, varies from making us sick to killing us.

But then what if our "bad" reactions to some viruses are our bodies just getting used to the DNA change, and if we survive, we could potentially be genetically more fit than before.(depending on what is required of us from our environment).

AND!!!! what if many viral diseases aren't "bad".  What if we haven't found the cure for the common cold because there is no cure because nothing is "wrong".  What if all the research going into finding a cure for these viruses is being blinded by our emotional reactions to the death they cause, and if we understood what really is going on when a virus tries to mingle with our bodies, we would know what to do.  Because WE ARE ALL JUST AN ACCUMULATION OF SUCCESSFUL VIRAL MODIFICATIONS!!!!

The implications here make me wanna scream to God from atop a flying carpet.


A virus MIGHT BE the leading agent in genetical variation, which is the motor for natural selection, which is the factory that made all of us animals and plants etc.  Viruses MIGHT BE the reason we are. (This last conjecture MIGHT BE going too far.)

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