So who's not a clever little virus then?

The COVID-19 virus is not a clever or sneaky virus (but it is not dumb either) ¹

Keith S. Taber

One of the things I have noticed in recent news reports about the current pandemic is the tendency to justify our susceptibility to the COVID-19 coronavirus by praising the virus. It is an intelligent and sneaky foe, and so we have to outwit it.

But no, it is not. It is a virus. It's a tiny collection of nucleic material packaged in a way that it can get into the cells which contain the chemical resources required for the virus to replicate. It is well suited to this, but there is nothing intelligent about the behaviour. (The virus does not enter the cell to reproduce any more than an ice cube melts to become water; or a hot cup of coffee radiates energy to cool down; or a toddler trips over to graze its knee rather than because gravity acts on it.) The virus is not clever nor sneaky. That would suggest it can adapt its behaviour, after reflecting upon feedback from its interactions with the environment. It cannot. Over generations viruses change – but with a lot of variations that fail to replicate (the thick ones in the family?)

Yet any quick internet search finds references to the claimed intellectual capacities of these deadly foes. Now of course an internet search can find references to virtually anything – but I am referring to sites we might expect to be authoritative, or at least well-informed. And this is not just a matter of a hasty response to the current public health emergency as it is not just COVID 19, but, it seems, viruses generally that are considered intellectually superior.

Those smart little viruses

The site Vaccines Today has a headline in a posting from 2014, that "Viruses are 'smart', so we must be smarter", basing its claims on a lecture by Colin Russell, Royal Society University Research Fellow at Cambridge University. It reports that "Dr Russell says understanding how 'clever' viruses are can help us to outsmart them". (At least there are 'scare quotes' in some of these examples.)

An article from 2002 in an on-line journal has the title "The contest between a clever virus and a facultatively clever host". Now I have moaned about the standard of many new internet journals, but this is the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, and the article is in volume 95, so I think it is safe to apply the descriptor 'well-established' to this journal.

A headline in Science news for Students (published by Society for Science & the Public) from 2016 reads "Sneaky! Virus sickens plants, but helps them multiply". I am sure it would not take long to find many other examples. An article in Science refers to a "nasty flu virus".

Sneaky viruses

COVID-19 is a sneaky virus according to a doctor writing in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Quite a few viruses seem to be sneaky – the the human papillomavirus is according to an article in the American Journal of Bioethics. The World Health Organisation considers that a virus that causes swine fever, H1N1, is sneaky according to an article in Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy, something also reported by the BMJ.

There are many references in the literature to clever viruses, such as Epstein‐Barr virus according to a piece in the American Journal of Transplantation. The Hepatitis C virus is clever according to an article in Clinical Therapeutics.

Science communication as making the unfamiliar, familiar

Science communication is a bit like teaching in that the purpose of communication is often to be informative (rather than say, social cohesion, like a lot of everyday conversation {and, by the way,it was another beautiful day here in Cambridgeshire today, blue sky – was it nice where you are?}) and indeed to make the unfamiliar, familiar. Sometimes we can make the unfamiliar familiar by showing people the unfamiliar and pointing it out. 'This is a conical flask'. Often, however, we cannot do that – it is hard to show someone hyperconjugation or hysteresis or a virus specimen. Then we resort to using what is familiar, and employing the usual teacher tricks of metaphor, analogy, simile, modelling, graphics, and so forth. What is familiar to us all is human behaviour, so personification is a common technique. What the virus is doing, we might suggest, is hijacking the cell's biochemical machinery, as if it is a carefully planned criminal operation.

Strong anthropomorphism and dead metaphors

This is fine as far as it goes – that is, if we use such techniques as initial pedagogic steps, as starting points to develop scientific understanding. But often the subsequent stage does not happen. Perhaps that is why there are so many dead metaphors in the language – words introduced as metaphors, which over time have simple come to be take on a new literal meaning. Science does its fair share of borrowing – as with charge (when filling a musket or canon). Dead metaphors are dead (that is metaphorical, of course, they were never actually alive) because we simply fail to notice them as metaphors any more.

There are probably just as many references to 'clever viruses' referring to computer viruses as to microbes – which is interesting as computer viruses were once only viruses metaphorically, but are now accepted as being another type of virus. They have become viruses by custom and practice, and social agreement.

Whoever decided to first refer to the covalent bond in terms of sharing presumably did not mean this in the usual social sense, but the term has stuck. The problem in education (and so, presumably, public communication of science) is that once people think they have an understanding, an explanation that works for them, they will no longer seek a more scientific explanation.

So if the teacher suggests an atom is looking for another electron (a weak form of anthropomorphism, clearly not meant to be taken too seriously – atoms are not entities able to look for anything) then there is a risk that students think they know what is going on, and so never seek any further explanation. Weak anthropomorphism becomes strong anthropomorphism: the atom (or virus) behaves like a person because it has needs and desires just like anyone else.

Why does it matter?

Perhaps in our current situation this is not that important – the public health emergency is a more urgent issue than the public understanding of the science. But it does matter in the long term. Viruses are not clever – they have evolved over billions of years, and a great many less successful iterations are no longer with us. The reason it matters is because evolution is often not well understood.

As an article in Evolution News and Science Today (a title that surely suggests a serious science periodical about evolution) tells us again that "Viruses are, to all appearances, very clever little machines" and asks "do they give evidence of intelligent design" (that is, rather than Darwinian natural selection, do they show evidence of having an intelligent designer?) After exploring some serious aspects of the science of viruses, the article concludes: "So it seems that viruses are intelligently designed" – that is, a position at odds with the scientific understanding that is virtually a consensus view based on current knowledge. Canonical science suggests that natural processes are able to explain evolution. But these viruses are so clever they must surely have been designed (Borg technology, perhaps?)

This is why I worry when I hear that viruses are these intelligent, deliberate agents that are our foes in some form of biological warfare. It is a dangerous way of thinking. So, I'm concerned when I read, for example, that the cytomegalovirus is not just a clever virus but a very clever virus. Indeed, according to an article in Cell Host & Microbe "CMV is a very clever virus that knows more about the host immune system and cell biology than we do". Hm.

(Read about 'anthropomorphism')

Footnote:

¹. The subheading was amended on 4th October 2021, after it was quite rightly pointed out to me that the original version, "COVID-19 is not a clever or sneaky virus (but it is not dumb either)", incorrectly conflated the disease with the virus.