Natural selection

It was a long time before I realized that "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean survival of the strongest, but rather survival of those creatures/beings best fitted to the conditions of their environments.  In Nature, each creature has some gift which allows it to survive and thrive, whether it's rapid multiple reproduction, speed, venom, the ability to burrow or climb or camouflage, etc.  We pink monkeys have the gift of these great big brains, with which we have been able to figure out how to protect ourselves from the elements, from other creatures, and from each other.  Mostly.

However, during this time of pandemic, I've begun to wonder if we have smarted ourselves right into a state of super-vulnerability.  We have used these brains to find preventatives, amelioratives, and, sometimes, cures for the germs which assault  us.  (For the sake of this opinion piece, I'm using the word 'germ' to include bacteria, viruses (viri?), microbes, and all the other little invisible critters which are much more efficient at taking us down than any lion or shark will ever be.)

This is a world of germs.  They are everywhere: in our guts, on our skin, in the air and water and soil all around us.  By fighting them, we have actually made ourselves more vulnerable to them, because we have deprived ourselves of the lessons our bodies would learn by living with them and fighting with them.  In interrupting the process of natural selection, we have interrupted survival of the fittest.  The unfit live and thrive and spread their seeds of weakness.  And because of that, I think ultimately the germs will win.  No amount of intelligence, our one great gift, will be able to overcome them in the end.  They will win.

After all, think of the early battles between conquerors in the Americas and the indigenous peoples.  The conquerors had superior weapons but were outnumbered, not to mention out of their element in the New World, and would most likely never have been able to terminate or subjugate the natives without their vulnerability to the diseases the Europeans brought with them.

I don't think COVID-19 is going to be the end of us (and if it is, it will be through our own stupidity).  But I feel fairly certain that, ultimately, it will be disease which will bring us down.  That or maybe full scale nuclear war.  And if it's germs, then there will most likely be those who survive through the luck of natural immunity.  And then, finally, natural selection will begin again.