[boredgargoyle]

There are probably thousands (and my guess would be much more) viruses that that dance on the information playground that is our genome, metagenome, and the genomes of the organisms we host. Fighting a few of them is probably not going to be a significant issue.

Having more individuals around by itself would also lead to mutations which the environment may select for in the future. By itself there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation (gene import) unless the environment proves it to be.

[ta8645]

You're really missing the point -- there's no way to know the future. Maybe your optimism is warranted, but maybe we stamped out a virus that would have given us a superpower.

The argument is _not_ that we should change our strategy of doing the best we can with the information we have. Just that we should have some humility about what we can and can't actually predict, or say with certainty.

[vlovich123]

Our superpower is developing technology. It’s unlikely evolution could ever outperform that as it operates on much slower time scales for adaptation. So any viral mutation now will only really manifest at population scale after hundreds of thousands of years whereas technology can do it within years or decades.

[theGnuMe]

Super powers would be sensory I think unless we sprout wings or gills. So things we've probably seen already in another species like infrared vision or what not... but we do have technology to do that already so the question is how does that influence the evolutionary landscape.