Imagine you’re building a LEGO city with your friends. In the traditional understanding of evolution (called Neo-Darwinism), you and your friends are constantly making random changes to your LEGO city. The best changes (the ones that help your city survive and thrive) stick around.

In this case, if viruses were part of the game, they’d be like bullies trying to knock your LEGO buildings over. You and your friends would have to work out ways to protect your city from these bullies.

However, a new paper by Bill Miller, Arthur Reber, Perry Marshall and Frantisek Baluska offers a new way of looking at things, called Cognition-Based Evolution.

Here, you and your friends are not just randomly building. Instead, you’re thoughtfully discussing and deciding what’s best for your city. You are actively using your tools and resources to keep the city safe and help it grow.

This is based on Natural Cellular Engineering, where cells in our body work together in a smart way to keep us healthy.

In this new perspective, viruses are not just bullies. Instead, they are like messengers or traders who go between different cities (or cell groups in our body), carrying information and resources. This new field of virology is called Natural Viral Engineering. These messengers can sometimes cause trouble (which is when we get sick), but they can also help in making our cities more resilient and innovative.

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