The most important thing that we have lost in this pandemic, those of us who are lucky enough to survive it, is spontaneity.

A well-known professor told me that he is already tired of this routine of months of social distancing, of telemeetings, of going to an empty office.

Every time we put on the mask, wash our hands or decline a social gathering, we are burying our spontaneity under the rationality of the fight against the virus.

The spontaneous is what is born to us, the natural impulse.

There are thinkers who liken it to our free will.

We could say, copying the example of

Jonathan Haidt

, that the spontaneous would be what our animal brain commands, which is below the rational brain.

But it is not so simple, the spontaneous is not always pure instinct.

And as the American psychologist says, frequently our reason makes up excuses to justify instincts.

The loss of spontaneity is due to our collective fight against the virus, however, these microscopic agents, which live by replicating in the cells of others, have conditioned human evolution for millions of years, acting in a much less Obviously the two brains of Haidt.

A

Charles Darwin

today would be

surprised to

see that humans are

descended from the monkey as much of the virus.

In the 1960s, Human Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs) were identified.

There is a work by the British molecular biologist

Robin Weiss

from 2006 that summarizes the authentic scientific adventure that his discovery entailed.

They were first classified as "genetic garbage", since ERVs would be the imprint left on the body by viral infections of old.

At first it was said that only 1% of the human genome was made up of VRE.

The amount has been increasing as it is investigated.

Today it is estimated that up to 10% of the genome could be made up of them.

And the impact of these retroviruses is so significant that certain characteristics of human pregnancy - the way the placenta implants, for example - have been conditioned by a protein originated by a viral infection in primates 25 million years ago.

Aris Katzourakis

, an Oxford paleovirologist, said yesterday on Twitter that if the energy devoted to the new British variant of the coronavirus were used to generate a great deal to eradicate it, this could be achieved.

This is the moment, according to him, before the virus changes us forever.

johnmuller.es@gmail.com

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