Polyploid

A thought... It's a frequent refrain in some circles that academia is being overrun by political correctness in the form of racial and gender politics. It is true to the extent that there seem to be many articles about gender and race. It is often impugned that this is being pushed by radical liberals and feminists (aka Social Justice Warriors) be those faculty or students. I'd like to offer an alternative interpretation. The activity in racial studies and gender studies (i.e. the study of women) in academia does not reflect an agenda of social change. It reflects the desire to succeed in academia by finding new truth. For centuries the impact of non-white people and women on the world has been systematically ignored in academia. To discover a new (and often significant) truth, all one has to do, is to look at an existing field, and ask one's self, how does it relate to people of color or women? If you ask this question, then you will find undiscovered or unrecognized facts

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began I've seen the idea posited that diseases evolve to become less deadly over time. I want to show who we know that this idea is wrong. The idea that antigenic drift leads to less deadly variants is a misunderstanding of host-disease co-evolution. It is generally true that if a disease and its primary host organisms have been co-evolving for many generations then we expect fewer hosts to die from the disease. One interpretation is that the disease has become less deadly. Another interpretation is that the host population as a whole has become more resistant to the disease. In the first case, the proposed mechanism is that disease organisms which kill their hosts don't spread as much, so the less virulent strains survive. In the second case, the mechanism is the disease kills off all the susceptible hosts before they can breed, and in later generations there only resistant hosts remaining. So lets do a thought experiment, and see how this plays ou