Pandemics and scapegoats

Emperor Marcus Aurelius

Human beings have an irresistible tendency to blame others for our misfortunes and our mistakes. In fact, this is a symptom of low maturity, very clear in children, who when they are caught red-handed doing something they shouldn’t, they always try to justify themselves by blaming someone else. But the trend is so widespread that it applies not just to children, but to most human beings.

In the particular case of pandemics, this is seen quite clearly. Epidemic diseases were almost unknown before the invention of cities, which took place some 10,000 years ago. But for a pandemic to be possible (an epidemic affecting a considerable part of the world), the world had to wait until there were great empires, with many internal and external commercial relations.

Literature and Science: Huxley and Heisenberg

Aldous Huxley

In 1963, the year of his death, Aldous Huxley published an essay titled Literature and Science. In it, he raises the existence of two different specialized languages, literary and scientific, different from the vulgar language, each of which is directed towards a specific objective:

• The purpose of literature is to describe, in the best possible way, man's most private experiences, especially those that deal with our feelings. To do this, it creates a specific language, where the ambiguity of words is the fundamental element giving strength. For Huxley, the term literature can be applied to all possible forms of the art of writing: poetry, drama, novel and essay, whose relationship with science he analyzes successively.
• Science, on the contrary, seeks to univocally describe the public (or less private) experiences of man, those that have to do with objective reality. To do this, the scientific language must be as far as possible free of ambiguity. Each term must have a univocal and unambiguous meaning. In the best case (as in physics) scientific language can be reduced to mathematical formulas.

Ant colonies, real and virtual

Formica fusca

Ants, hymenoptera related to wasps, are social insects. An anthill or ant colony can contain, from a few dozen individuals, to over half a million. The number of castes varies, depending on the species, between three (fertile males and females, sterile female workers) and over twenty. The feeding a larva receives decides the caste to which it will belong.

Strange forms of parasitism have arisen among ants, as in Amazons ants (Polyergus), whose workers specialize in fighting and starve in the presence of food, unless a worker of Formica fusca feeds them. To seize these auxiliaries, the Amazons attack the nests of Formica fusca, kill their queen and enslave the workers. In extreme cases, such as ants of the Anergates genus, the queen invades a nest of Tetramorium, supplants its queen, and fed by the workers of the other species, produces eggs that become queens and males, but no workers, which are not needed.

Evolution in social insects probably reached the highest levels of instinctive complexity that can be achieved with a nervous system as limited as that of arthropods. In the tens of million years since the origin of these societies, evolution has introduced secondary changes, which have led to great diversity: there are more than three thousand species of ants, but there seems to have been no progress in their social structure. They are highly successful animals, very abundant, and spread throughout the world, but stagnant.

Mathematics of the pandemic

The May issue of the Spanish magazine on popular science Investigación y Ciencia, associated to Scientific American, contains an article authored by Bartolo Luque, Fernando Ballesteros and Octavio Miramontes, in which they apply to the current pandemic a mathematical model that dates back over a century. This model describes the first phase of the pandemic, the exponential rise of the first part of the logistics curve that I referred to in a previous post in this blog, and makes it possible to compare the evolution of the disease in various countries, depending on the virus containment measures that have been taken in each of them. It could also serve to explain why Spain has become the country with the most cases in Europe and with the most deaths per 100,000 inhabitants in the world.