Aha moments

Explaining the Common Cold and the Line at the DMV

You have questions? I have explanations.

During the two long years of COVID I often found myself wondering why we have viruses, particularly the common cold. Why hasn’t evolution evolved away something so simple and useless?

Then one day I was reading about COVID outcomes and there is one particular early scenario that often leads to death — when a patient has COVID but doesn’t have a fever.

Wait. Aren’t fevers bad?

No. Fevers are actually good for you. They are the body’s immune sytem reacting to get rid of a virus or infection. Saying fevers are bad is the immunological equivalent of shooting the messenger.

Here’s my theory. The common cold is like a systems check for our body. Having a relatively harmless virus make its way through the population every year keeps our immune systems healthy and active for when something really bad comes along.

This happens at the expense of individuals who may succumb to a flu, but it keeps the species strong, and that, after all, is what evolution does — it protects species, not individuals.

Allow me to torture a metaphor. The common cold is like running your writing through a spell checker. The occasional misspelled word will die, but the story will be stronger.

Things don’t just happen, not over time anyway. Species survival drives evolution, and when it comes to our particular human species, we’re mostly driven by economics. Also ego, survival, and psychological brain glitches, but mostly economics.

For many years, whenever I would go to India to visit relatives, it meant spending an entire day in the chaos of the Indian Embassy in Toronto to get a visa. I would sit there, look around at the huge lines of visa supplicants, hear the wailing of infants and adults waiting for the bathroom, and wonder — in a modern civilization, how does such inefficiency continue to exist?

I got my answer when my friend Raj Rathee and I were planning visit to the motherland. Raj is an eye surgeon (a damn good one), and has many patients grateful for his restoring their sight. One of his patients happened to be an employee at the Indian Embassy, and he said that when we went to get our visas, just give his name.

Arriving at the embassy, it took a while to find anyone to speak to, but when we gave the name of Raj’s patient, we were pointed down a hallway I’d never noticed before, with an unmarked door at the end.

Raj knocked on the door, and a voice immediately rang out, “Who is it?”

Raj replied, “Uh, hi, we’re looking for…” and gave his patient’s name.

The door opened and we were ushered inside a sumptuous office by an attractive aide. There was nobody else there but us and the aide. Apparently she was expecting us.

She asked us if we would like tea, and like good Indian boys of course we said yes. She then asked if we had brought the money for the visa application. We handed over our passports and two crisp $50 bills and she asked us to have a seat at a coffee table. I began leafing through a large picture book of Indian history and marveled to Raj, “Wow, thank god you know somebody important. This is awesome!”

The aide returned almost immediately with our tea. Raj grinned and said “Thank you” as we settled in for a comfortable wait.

I had taken perhaps two sips of the tea when the aide returned again. With our passports and visas. A grand total of 20 minutes had elapsed.

And there, dear reader, is the reason why getting a visa at the embassy, getting into a nightclub, and getting your license renewed at the DMV are all such miserable experiences.

Nobody important, nobody with the power to fix the situation, ever has to deal with the situation.

VIPs get whisked away to their table. Politicians have their assistants renew their licenses. Diplomats and their friends have tea and sit in comfort while their visas are processed.

There are reasons for everything. You might not like it, but the reason exists. From simple phenomena like why is there braille on drive-thru ATM buttons, to existential questions like ‘why haven’t we met aliens yet?’, there are reasons.

It’s cheaper to produce a single button and use it on all ATMs than to produce a no-braille button just for drive-thru ATMs. The aliens? Still working on that one.

At a recent U2 concert, I was confronted with a disturbing message in a disturbingly large font.

Everything you know is wrong.

Think about the history of physics, or health, or chemistry. Every time we thought we had it figured out, new knowledge came along and proved the old knowledge wrong. Gods galloping across the sky, suns revolving around planets, planets revolving around suns, space-time equivalency, quantum foam and uncertainty principles… what are the odds that this time we’ve got it right?

Imagine looking at a computer screen and seeing a white ball slowly moving across a black background, then colliding with a paddle, and bouncing back in the other direction. As a reasonable human, you would assume that the ball of white pixels reacted to the paddle of white pixels the same way a tennis ball reacts to a tennis racquet.

And you would be completely, hopelessly, wrong.

Everything has an explanation, a reason. If it seems random, or worse, stupid, then you just don’t understand the reason.

There are many unanswered questions about our universe. Why are other stars so far away? Is there life after death? What is the nature of consciousness?

I believe that in the next 50 years, perhaps with the aid of AI, we are going to get some mind-blowing answers to these and more questions. The answers will be akin to looking past pixels to understand semi-conductors, silicon, and software. I can hardly wait.

Now if somebody could just explain to me why we have mosquitoes.

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