Vigilance vs. tolerance

One of the biggest challenges that the phenomenon of life has to face is finding a compromise between persistence and change: in an environment with highly dynamic conditions even the most resilient of organisms can find itself cornered at the edge of extinction. As far as we can reconstruct, life started as such when certain chemical structures found a way to produce copies of themselves (that is literal copies) from the substances they found in their environment, some of which worked as building blocks (anabolites) while others helped in the construction process (catabolites). However, this process of identical copy has one very important limitation: it does not provide the means for change. In particular, if one of the entities was sensitive to a certain chemical compound in the environment, every other entity was also sensitive in the same way. Also a sudden scarcity in one of the critical components could severely curtail the ability of these molecules to reproduce themselves.

Just a few million years later, life figured out that encasing all critical elements within a globule (the cell membrane) could mitigate the sensitivity to the environment in a very significant way. All important compounds could be stored within the cell walls for later use, capturing when they were available and preventing them from going anywhere even it they were not to be used immediately. This did not mean that cells could live forever in a hostile environment, but it certainly reduced the reliance on a favorable environment. Still, the unique genetic code meant that if a foreign molecule managed to invade or poison one cell, it would be able to do it with every cell. This weakness must have lead to the demise of countless lineages, but it was not bad enough to completely stop evolution, first to nucleated cells (eukaryotes) and then to the first multicellular organisms.

Photo: Maryland GovPics

The next "lucky" step was the discovery of sexual reproduction, when tho compatible individuals mixed their genetic load to produce new individuals whose DNA was different from both of their parents. This must have bee a complex step for evolution: how did any species start to produce eggs that could be fertilized by another individual? The charm of this approach is that compatible individuals would probably have 99% identical DNA, so choosing between the father or the mother would not make any difference at all. Only for a relatively small sub-set of genes the information in both parents could be different, but the set was small enough that picking either of them or even a mix would still result in a cable offspring.

The result of this evolutionary step is that any species with sexual reproduction is bound to have a certain amount of genetic variability, which is in fact a mechanism of resiliency: while most individuals will probably suffer when faced with a toxin or environmental change, a few of them will naturally have a better disposition to survive under adverse conditions, so their genome would eventually become more prevalent in the population, leading to the evolution of the species. But the key element here is diversity: Some individuals might be able to thrive in a dryer environment, while others would prefer a wetter one. In the end it was the changes in the environment what decided which "clan" thrived and which one perished. But the remarkable feature is that each of these clans were, to some extent, sub-optimal for the present conditions but they held the key to their survival in the future.

In the scope of human societies, the same scheme works with ideas. Artists and scientists might not be of immediate use for the society in the present, but they might hold the key to its future survival. In fact, there are problems so complex that even experts might not be able to find a solution on their own, and an unexpected inspiration from the outside might actually kick-start an avenue that no one had ever considered before. This is precisely why, in democratic societies we try to enable everyone to contribute their opinions: town hall hearings, for instance, are an incessant source of surprising insights provided by the citizens, which are often more tightly linked to the problem than the town administrators.

The balance is, however, hard to find: no matter which way the decision goes, some people are going to think that it is too short and others that it is too long, but it is of critical importance that everybody agrees to follow the rule even if it does not exactly fit their expectations. In that sense social uniformity can be really helpful: if all citizens have a very similar point of view there is going to be little discussions as to what the rules should be and the community can run smoothly and efficiently in the short term: in the end, less policing means that there are more resources for other purposes. However, this uniformity might as well mean its undoing when faced with a serious challenge, because the citizens will naturally have the same suggestions and, if this does not solve the problem, the community might not have the diversity to provide alternatives that actually work. On the other hand, societies with bigger diversity might be force to repeatedly remind their citizens to follow rules that are not "natural" to them, but when facing a change the assortment of proposed solutions is likely to be wider, and the chances of overcoming the threat better.

One weak point of this approach is that listening to (and assessing) all opinions might take a long time even when the situation requires at least some level of immediate response. In this case the conventional approach is that the governing bodies take a first set of emergency actions aimed at mitigating the adverse effect of the threat in the short term even if they are somewhat sub-optimal, thus buying time to listen to more options and have a more insightful debate as to what the final solution might be. And the goals are completely different: emergency measures shall aim at having the situation under control, where are final measure shall try to solve the problem for the future.

I came to think about this today because of the current situation with COVID and the vaccination mandates. From my point of view, the shelter-in-place and the mask mandates were adequate at the time to try to have the situation under control. Science will tell us over the next few years how effective they were, but they were obviously not enough. The widespread distribution of the "vaccines" (I will go into the quotes on a different post) was the second wave of emergency measures. It is unclear how much of the improvement is actually due to the inoculations and how much to the natural development of the virus, but the happy fact is that the pandemic is now reasonably under control: cases are still high, but both deaths and hospitalizations are in decline.

In the meantime, however, there is a segment of the population (including a non-negligible fraction of medical professionals) that still have serious doubts about both the efficacy and the safety of these inoculations. Many governments, on the other hand, are willing to ignore these doubts and instead pass vaccine mandates and issue vaccination passports. Is this justifiable under the blanket of emergency measures? From my point of view it is not. The pandemic is, in both the US and Western Europe, under control so it is now the time to try to find a long-term solution, but this cannot happen through staunching the dissent and imposing a single line of thought. This is not only contrary to the democratic principles that we have given ourselves, but it could even be dangerous for our society, from risking a civil chasm between supporters and detractors to the establishment of a black market of forgeries. I am not against vaccine mandates, but I do not think that now is the right time to issue them, and neither do I think that the current substances will qualify in the long term. Let us see what time brings. Have a nice weekend.