Kyle Harper

Collateral damage.

We're totally irrelevant to the like really core evolutionary history.

The plague just wants to infect rodents.

Of course, I'm – it's not really like wanting to do this.

The plague makes a living.

It survives out there in burrowing rodent colonies.

We're like –

I mean, it doesn't care at all.

And so it has no evolved incentive to modulate its virulence to be able to transmit sustainably.

Plague never sustains itself in human populations.

It can transiently infect human populations, but then it always dies out.

It becomes extinct, that lineage.

Yeah, this is – you need to ask me in five years because we've learned so much and now this is like the thing that we fall in the category of like almost a new question now that we can ask because now that we have the Neolithic –

lineages and the Bronze Age lineages we're starting to like piece together this fuller history but we still don't even like totally understand the boundaries of when is the plague really sort of not circulating in human populations and what are the factors that cause it to be so explosive like is it evolution of the bacterium is there something about the genetics of the lineages that escape from the animal reservoirs that are like especially transmissible is it

Human ecology, like that we put rodents, like black rats, you know, in the right place to get the disease.

Is that there's something about the climate stress that renders the – we don't have a great understanding of like why the plague comes and goes.

So that's scary.

And the –

The – connecting it to the – your other question about like these superbugs.

I mean what's interesting in the very big picture about the plague to me is like – even like the history of infectious disease is like on the one hand, like there's a real core of it that's just like basic principles of ecology and evolution.