Turns Out God Doesn't Particularly Care About Humans

Munich, November 2, 2019 -- The re-examination of a previously explored RNA genome code found on a rhinovirus, one of the class of viruses that cause the common cold, has revealed the surprising discovery that God is apparently not particularly interested in human beings at all, despite widespread belief to the contrary.

Human rhinovirus containing coded messages from God

The discovery is anticipated to have a potentially significant impact on the ways in which humankind views itself in relation to and interacts with its environment.

Dr. Sigmund Weltanschauung of the Munich-based Institut für die Studie der Virusgenome, a leader of the genome research team that made the discovery, said the discovery was, as is so often the case, the result of a happy accident.

"We were working very late one night on decoding the rhinovirus genome – actually, Human Rhinovirus A, a common cause of the common cold – as part of our continuing search for some kind of solution to the sniffles," Dr. Weltanschauung said. "It was also during our annual Oktoberfest, so some of us were ein wenig, what is the word, drizzled from the beer. For having fun a junior scientist on our team, young Dr. Menschlich, started feeding the codon combinations – you know, the sequences of letters, U, C, A, and G that combine to specify different amino acids in a gene – directly into a paralinguistic decoding machine he had won as a drinking award at the celebrations that evening. When we saw what the result was, I can to you say that we had much need of some more beer, ho, ho, ho."

According to Dr. Weltanschauung, the paralinguistic decoding machine, which extracts samples from lengthy sequences of letters or other symbols more or less arbitrarily until it detects a translatable pattern, was initially stumped by the codon combinations. However, after it had received a chain comprising over 190,000 individual letters, it began producing recognizable text.

"What the code translated to, basically, was a series of instructions," Dr. Weltanschauung said. "Presumably, these were instructions from God, the Creator, directly to the soul of the rhinovirus as contained within its RNA. Thanks to the paralinguistic decoder, we could suddenly read these instructions in plain German. And they made us all feel, I think I could say, very much unflated."

The paralinguistically decoded codon combination from the Human Rhinovirus A genome, according to Dr. Weltanschauung, read, essentially: "Go forth, noble virus, and multiply. You are the chosen one. Find the creatures that inhabit the earth and spread Thee among them, yea, for Thine destiny is to propagate the Earth, My creation, in accordance with My divine will. They shall by Thy carriers, and Thee their burden."

"There was some more to it, but it was more or less the same general idea," Dr. Weltanschauung said. "What we think this means is essentially that God's plan for creation here on Earth is to create a world that is friendly to viruses, and to make sure there are enough creatures, people included, inhabiting the world that the viruses can continue to live in and prosper and multiply. Excuse me, I sneezed. God bless me. When you think about it, it does seem to make a certain amount of sense. But it does put humankind into a more subservient position in the general sphere of things, I should say. Just carriers for viruses along with snakes and ferrets and tse-tse flies. Ho, hum."

Dr. Weltanschauung said his research team will now undertake the task of running the genomes of hundreds of other common viruses through the paralinguistic translator, in the event that God's message, or similar messages, are repeated there.

"We will also be running the human genome through the translator," Dr. Weltanschauung said, "but I'm not feeling very, what is the word, chipper about what we're probably going to find there."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor