THE BIG TALK
An occasional interview series with Americans who are challenging the status quo.
There is a reason the coronavirus has swept from east to west and an explanation for some degree of its limited lethality as well: It’s in our DNA.
It’s not the virus, but susceptibility to it, said Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University.
“The virus was flying around the globe like blood in the human body,” Mr. Bejan said. “And I know why.”
Part of Mr. Bejan’s theory lies in his constructal law of thermodynamics, an element of physics holding that “for a finite-size flow system to persist in time it must evolve so that it provides easier access to its currents.”
In layman’s English, organisms maximize the flow of what is important. An aerial view of a big river delta, a mature oak tree and its leaves, and a lightning bolt all follow similar patterns per constructal law.
“Things are obvious, irrefutable, yet seemingly disconnected,” said Mr. Bejan, 72, offering one observation that helped him develop the law.
COVID-19 followed an established trail, too, tracing in reverse the path that humans first trod out of Africa. On that original path, homo sapiens had three interbreeding events with Neanderthals. Anthropologists consider these events sudden rather than gradual.
Today, those with the most Neanderthal DNA (the maximum in any human is 4%) are the most at risk, Mr. Bejan said, and Africa has never suffered the massive infections once predicted for it.
He put forth his theory in a paper last week, “Coronavirus invasion and Neanderthal retreat.”
Given how connected the world is today and how quickly those connections can be made, the outbreak pattern from China seeping westward tells the story, Mr. Bejan said.
“The conflict between the easy explanation and the pattern in the data (chronology, geography, spreading) means only one thing: people on the globe are not uniformly susceptible to the coronavirus,” he wrote. “If not equally susceptible, then why?
“The answer lies in a much older phenomenon that looks just like the virus spreading, except that the older spreading happened in the opposite direction,” the paper said. “The older phenomenon is the spreading of humans.”
Or, as Mr. Bejan put it in a recent conversation, “We’re mutts; not all dogs belong to the same breed.”
Mr. Bejan’s personal history also traces from east to west.
He was born under the communist heel in Romania, which he described as a horrible experience during which Moscow tried to crush all native language, history and culture.
“I am very much an enemy of communism,” he said. “It’s a tragedy when someone comes with a big ax, trying to make a new design from scratch after they’ve plowed the old one over. It is the most terrible crime, but one bound to be repeated, unfortunately.”
Mr. Bejan escaped during the Prague Spring of 1968 and came to America. He earned three degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and helped with submarine warfare during his doctoral studies.
“The Hunt for Red October — you know that plot?” he asked of the bestselling book and hit movie in which a Russian captain maneuvers his submarine into defection. “Well, that is exactly the sort of thing we were working on, and I was the guy translating all the Soviet articles into English.”
While corresponding with friends still behind the Iron Curtain, Mr. Bejan said, he answered their questions about the West with something he still believes. “Here, a policeman is your best friend; there, he is your worst enemy,” he said.
While at Duke, he outlined the constructal law in books with modest titles such as “Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology and Social Organizations.”
The law also works, often unconsciously, in what humans have put on Earth, including highway systems that try to maximize traffic flow and the cooling system Mr. Bejan designed for laptop computers.
That design, along with his constructal theory, earned him the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 2018 from the Franklin Institute, which rewards breakthrough thinking in science and technology and has been bestowed more than 120 times on future Nobel laureates. Mr. Bejan earned his medal “for his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions in thermodynamics and convection heat transfer that have improved the performance of engineering systems.”
Despite such intimidating language, Mr. Bejan said, his thinking is designed to simplify natural phenomena.
“I realized I was not mimicking nature; I was predicting it,” he said.
Like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) before it, COVID-19 originated in China, the landmass in which the last of three major interbreeding events occurred in human evolution. As the final such event, it was the one that transmitted the most Neanderthal DNA.
Because it would be foolish to think COVID-19 will be the last virus to strike the human race, he said, it is important to know how it follows an ancient map and acknowledge the patterns the good and bad, often unknowingly, have always traveled.
“This will make it easier to track disease, and we’ll be better able to deliver help to the people who need it the most,” Mr. Bejan said.
With that knowledge, some humility is in order.
“The voice of authority here on campus now says homo sapiens are all-powerful, nothing could compete with him,” Mr. Bejan said. “Well, the Neanderthals were powerful, too. They’d been around a long time.”
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