Viral Altruism and the Logic of Self-Propagation

Context: Viruses Have a Secret, Altruistic Social Life

Perhaps, in reflecting on the apparent peculiarity of such a notionally “social” system, we unwittingly shed light on the strangeness of those macroscopic social, cultural and communications systems with which we are more intimately familiar. A logic of self-organisation, information-pattern replication and complexity appears at every inflection of discovery to reveal itself as some kind of explanatory “master key”. A gestalt homeostasis of social systems (at all ends of the scale spectrum) is an emergent property of non-linear complexity; cooperation, collaboration, exploitation and (adversarial) competition are sub-functions of an underlying and self-propagating (holistic) logical principle.