Viruses are everywhere. There are 10³³ of the teensy buggers on the planet. Just the weight of those in the ocean equals 75 million blue whales. They’re in your gut track, in dirt, in food; they’re even on the fringes of space, way high up in the atmosphere. Most viruses are not pathogens. We don’t even know what the hell most viruses do, other than that they exist.

Chunks of viral DNA make up a good part of the chordate genome. All of us creatures with anything like a backbone are chordates. This viral DNA in us is pretty much from viruses called retroviruses. They get in a cell and high jack the DNA, sticking their little genome into the DNA of the host cell, to make the host cell crank out more of the virus when the cell does it’s usual business.

Now retroviruses are messy little buggers when it comes to reproducing themselves. When a new little retrovirus pops out, it frequently has a bit of the host’s DNA as part of it’s genome, which then gets jammed into the DNA of a new host. The interesting part of the show happens when the retrovirus attacks an egg or a sperm cell, and the egg or sperm cell gets lucky, and I do mean in the naughty nudge nudge wink wink say no more kind of lucky.

The newly formed chordate progeny now has some of whatever that virus has been in before stuck into it, which can be made more interesting if that virus has gone and jumped species, like from pigs to birds to humans to… well you get my drift. Genetic drift.

Important things are known to have come from such retroviral shenanigans. Things like how placentas form during pregnancy in different mammals, where similar things occur but were caused by chunks of DNA inserted by different retroviruses in different species of mammals. Geneticists and microbiologists are just really beginning to look into this.

Here’s where I go all quasi on the subject.

I’ve been thinking that viruses are small enough to be quantum entangled. That is, you can produce a state in a group of them such that, if you tickle one of them, the others will start giggling, too. What you do to one of them happens to the other ones, as well.

I therefore googled it and found out that I’m not the only one who thinks so. There are scientists actually doing research, real experiments on the hypothesis, and there’s evidence that it really happens.

Now, if viruses are a major force driving evolution, and they apparently are, and they can be quantum entangled, which they apparently can, and quantum entanglement works through a higher order reality, or dimension, which is what theoretical physics currently thinks, is there a higher order intelligence, or intelligences, doing some of that quantum linking? When I look at evolutionary history, I see life going from exceedingly simple organisms, to more complex ones, to a highly complex, highly interdependent system, which is the opposite of what the theory of entropy says should happen.

And by higher order intelligences I do not mean ancient aliens.

First shared on the Squatcher’s Lounge Podcast: