I recently watched “The Matrix” on cable (again) and saw the part where Agent Smith was giving his theory about humans being equated to a virus. Of course, since he is not human, I naturally felt that he was wrong and must be destroyed at all costs. However, thinking about it, I believe he made some sense. In a way, humans are a virus. We DO survive by spreading to different places and we DO NOT reach an equilibrium with the environment like with most animals. Of course, the obvious can be stated such as we are highly sentient beings with enormous mental capabilities and bodies equiped to carry out our needs and wants. It seems like we are over-grown, multi-cellular, mentally superior viruses.
We are no more a virus than the average (non-viral) species is. However, there is one big thing that allows us to be pretty destructive at times: Our mastery of tools and fire. We can chop down whole forests with our axes and chainsaws, we can overfish whole oceans with our ships and dragnets, we can pollute whole regions with our tool-using industries, etc. We’re not viral, we’re just apes with unusually big brains, tools, and fire.
Well, I mean, we do inject our DNA into members of a host organism, let it sit in there and divide again and again, then wait until the time is ripe before it breaks out as a squirming new virus.
Good point Myrr21, and come to think of it. My Protein Coat is getting a little itchy. Maybe it’s time for me to go find a host cell to reproduce.
Remember your first host cell? I was sooo nervous. It wasnt her first time. I could tell since she was full of other tiny little viruses. She was fat and ready to blow. eeer I mean explode. But I was a loser at the time and I could only get with a fat cell. Boy was she wonderful. She exploded later that night though. sniff sniff.
Ahhh the memories…
“Life is just an STD that’s 100% fatal.”
–Some person
SNL - David Spade as Jeff Foxworthy on the Ebola virus:
“If you list among your hobbies making people bleed from the eyes and anus, you might be the Ebola virus.
If your primary residence is in the intestinal tract of the African green monkey, you just might be the Ebola virus.
If you walk into a room and people scream, ‘Hey, the Ebola virus,’ you might…etc etc etc”
Sorry. This could actually be an interesting question, but I’m in a weird mood instead.
Smeghead, do you have a link to that? I’d love to print it up and give it to a few medical types I know. They’d get a kick out of it.
I think the idea of equilibrium in the natural environment is a bit overrated. Even non-human organisms compete with and displace each other, drive each other to extinction, change the conditions of their environment, and so on. The most dramatic example there is evidence for is not even human-driven. A couple billion years ago, mircoorganisms that exhaled O[sub]2[/sub] helped fundamentally change Earth’s atmospheric chemistry, driving those anaerobes into restricted niches while the aerobes flourished.
The difference with humans is one of quantity, not quality. Opposed to other changes, ours is unusually rapid (these changes usually take place on evolutionary, not human, time scales), unusually widespread (our influence is all over the planet, even in the Arctic and Antarctic), we’re unusually numerous for a large vertebrate, and our actions are performed by creatures with foresight and deliberate intent.
That having been said, I think we have a responsibility to use our greater intelligence and wisdom to reduce the impact of our influence on the environment and avoid not only cataclysmic changes, such as the one mentioned above, but also extinctions of other species and dismantling ecosystems.
I did really love that Agent Smith rant, though. 
Sorry, no. That was just off the top of the piles of garbage littering what’s left of my mind.
I agree with wevets.
Humans will eventually reach an equilibrium – and it’s not going to be pretty. We’ve been good at delaying it by spreading fast & changing the environment to suit our needs. But, there are not infinite resources.
I agree, in a way. I believe if we ever reach a true equilibrium, it will be at zero. All populations, even in the plant community, have some dynamics to them, by definition. You might say the local deer population is at equilibrium now, but if six months later they’re dying off left and right for lack of winter food, was it really an equilibrium?
Sure, humans are a more dynamic population than most, but the comparison is kind of silly.
The biggest flaw in the “human is virus” notion…
A virus needs to constantly be finding a new host because it damages the host. Humans (while they DO “damage the host”, they also repair the host, so it evens out) need to be constantly spreading because they OUTGROW their “host” (Earth).
Will there be an equlibrium? Yeah… but I like to think that the equilibrium will encompass numerous worlds, populated by humanity. I’m a sci-fi nut, sue me.
Equilibrium does not necessarily mean stasis. (If I remember my biology) many species’ populations follow a graphical “Monod” (pronounced “mo-no”) type kinetics consisting of slow growth, then transitioning to exponential growth, then transitioning to a plateau, then die-off. Humans seem to be in the exponential growth stage. When resources dry up, our growth will slow and plateau out.
Sure, there can be short-term variations, but the average total population over extended periods of time can remain in equilibrium.
Definitely. As pointed out before, we are different in the most basic of aspects. The poetic notion (fitting to the Matrix) that humans spread without equilibrium is just plain drek. All species spread without thinking about their equilibrium…it’s just that other species are forced into equilibrium by natural processes whereas humans have so far been able to keep digging up more resources to sustain a larger population…eventually, we’ll hit our wall unless we change our behavior (we have the benefit of being able to conceptualize/plan much further into the future than other species)
Koyaanisqatsi
Yea, but then your next ice age comes and shoots it all to hell… Call it a temporary equilibrium if you wish, but the world is far too dynamic to reach a true, constant equilibrium–there will always be something to upset it.
(Sorry, my pessimistic, devil’s advocate side is showing :))
wevets wrote:
Ecosystems, shmecosystems.
We won the evolutionary lottery, we get to do to this planet whatever we damn well feel like. Screw the endangered species – if they’re so great, why are they endangered, huh? Hmm? I don’t care how magnificent a hunter the rare Bengal Tiger is. Can a Bengal Tiger put a working communications satellite into geostationary orbit? Would a Bengal Tiger even think of throwing its kill into the 'fridge so he could eat it later? Never.
Frankly, at this point, I’d rather have the Bengal tiger in charge of the U.S. space program.
Ah, I can just feel the love
Anyhoo, before we run with this (which could be a whole thread or ten by itself), I’d like to recommend for reading Costanza et al. 1997. The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature vol. 387 p. 253-260. Fascinating reading!
The Cliff Notes version is this: not only are the services provided by functioning ecosystems to humans worth about twice the sum of global GNPs annually, but many are irreplaceable by human technology in any case (nothing like a dozen scientists writing an article to state the obvious, huh? 
).
I think we have a vested interest in preserving these functioning ecosystems; after all, they help us preserve human life.
On an unrelated note, perhaps the term homeostasis would be better than equilibrium? Or is that a little too Gaian? I’m not sure I would use that term myself either. 