Kyle Harper

I mean we do certain things in the environment that creates the conditions that pathogens can evolve and take advantage of.

But on top of that, like evolution is just creative and weird and contingent and unpredictable.

And it's those little like contingent facts that can end up having these really, really huge effects.

And so in the case of the plague, like you would never –

If you were like really, really knowledgeable about the basics of ecology and evolution of disease, you would never be like I think that, you know, every now and then a rodent disease from Central Asia is going to wipe out half of the continent.

Like that shouldn't – that's not predictable.

That shouldn't be happening.

And actually that one is kind of an outlier.

But like infectious disease is always kind of like that.

I mean tuberculosis has probably killed more people maybe than any other infectious disease.

It's like this horrible disease.

It's just this –

We don't really understand it.

Now we really don't understand where it came from because it doesn't look like it is an animal host before it has humans.

And it's just a weird disease.

It's just a bacterial pathogen that in the huge world of bacteria, this one is very, very good at hiding.

And so it gets in your chest and it just lurks.

And then it will just waste you away, particularly if you're poor and you're stressed.

And so like –

There's some core principles there, but then it's just like something weird about it.