Interdisciplinary comments highlighting the importance of supramicrobiological approaches to Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

This article explores the links between the Covid-19 pandemic and the principles of biology using applied physics as a common analytical framework. Such links involve supramicrobiological questions: (i) Does the interaction humans ↔ pandemics fit the mainstream of evolutionary biology? (ii) Why does there appear to be an increase in pandemic frequency? (iii) Why are these pandemics preferentially emerging in the Far East? (iv) Why do the populations of zones that belong to the same economic system react differently to the same pandemics? v) Are there reasons to expect these outbreaks to become more frequent? Methodologically speaking, this article is simple: interdisciplinary links are established and statistical procedures based on data extracted from international institutions are interspersed in order to support the respective interdisciplinary link. The results suggest that (a) zoonotic diseases do not coincide with what is expected according to the orthodox Darwinian approach on at least two points (gradualism, and evolutionary process at the population scale); (b) socioeconomic niches and socio-diversity (the social equivalent of biodiversity) connected to them act as strong selective pressures either for or against pandemics; (c) socioeconomic development is equivalent to a drift from r to K in human systems, and as a result there is a drift from K to r in ecosystems, which favors a tendency to increase pandemic frequency; (d) ecohistorical analysis indicates that those countries or areas that display a faster rate of economic growth act as socioeconomic Maxwell’s demons that modulate, either voluntarily or involuntarily, the emergence of pandemics.