Mindflayer said:
The panacea thing never made much sense anyway.
I'll be honest, I don't think your sources are particularly great at supporting your argument.
Mindflayer said:
1. Human organism constantly mutates from viruses, becoming resilient to them. They remain in your DNA forever, their presence makes your immune system learn how to produce antibodies. Culture also accelerates genetic changes greatly.
Either this panacea actively decides what is good ("healing") and what is bad ("damage") for you, which would be very problematic. Or, more likely, it operates on some fixed pre-set.
Now imagine that some 'genius' outsources the immune system to some external thing that alters your DNA. On a planetary civilizational level, no less. Not to make your immune system learn new responses, but to get it all back to some ancient square one. There could have been some crucial adaptations developed in a, say, last thousand years, and yet suddenly tens of thousands of years of evolutionary adjustment are simply undone, the whole civilization is now addicted to some incomprehensible Dark-Age-Of-Technology drug not to die from a minor sneeze or food poisoning. Should they miss a fix, the problem will start repeating itself over and over again.
No wonder that in canon the STC was restricted to a chosen few.
What really makes me wonder, is that why it is Nurgle who is upset over this elimination of change and not Tzeentch.
The sources do not say that humans "constantly" mutate from viruses. A handful of sequences do pass on, sure, but even if most cells are altered, if it doesn't get the reproductive system it's going nowhere. "Their presence makes your immune system learn how to produce antibodies" is a pretty severe misrepresentation of the source. If you read the science paper attached to that source, it has even less that would lead you to that conclusion. This is just talking about how endogenous retroviruses (a virus that has encoded itself into your DNA) are kept in check by antibodies, and how that might help immunity to related viral species. It doesn't mean your immune system is utterly dependent on them to make antibodies. And these events where they incorporate into your genome are very rare
And if Panacea operates on a pre-set, what is to say that a) the pre-set doesn't include the various useful co-opted viral DNA sequences or b) it couldn't be updated over time by the people who made it (they can't anymore, but that might not have been considered). I kind of get what you are saying about how it might delete evolution that occurred since the thing was invented, but it's absurd to assume this would make us entirely immunocompromised - it is not in any way comparable to, as you say, "outsourcing the immune system". The adaptive immune system of humans is an incredible thing that does not need thousands of additional years of evolution to function because it works now, it will work in the DAoT and it will work in 40k unless drastic and deliberate edits are made to disable it - it does not "learn" or "remember" things in the same way our brains do and trying to make more than surface-level comparisons is pretty dubious. Even if we lacked the head start we previously had from that evolution to counter viruses/incorporating them into our genome, we'd still be able to produce antibodies given time or have vaccinations against diseases produced that would still work just fine. We don't just become helpless even in the worst-case scenario. Plus, bacteria and viruses co-evolve with the immune systems they fight against, which means a reset might work against them just as much as it works for them. It has potential to be an accidental net positive as well as a net negative.
However, this pre-set does not in any way need to be so total as to revert the Protectorate back to M25 humanity. In fact, we know it isn't. Cain and all the others who use it show no clear signs that they have had drastic genetic modification. A relatively simple computational system could check cells all across the body and mathematically estimate what the person's original genetics were most likely to have been, then reset them to that. No danger of wrecking pre-existing defences from the past 15k years of evolution, and the constant use of it isn't going to mean that viruses move on without us, because anything that corrects DNA mutations with such extreme effectiveness is going to utterly ruin viral infectivity and render every infection a dead-end with little possibility for an evolutionary counter. Plus you can combine that with adaptive immunity responding to the infection and careful targeting to prevent Panacea unnecessarily tampering with the immune system and the person probably will still gain a level of immunity even if the Panacea cures them. Or you could, once again, force it to occur with vaccines.
While I'm not sure what point you are trying to make with the link to exaptation, I do think it is clear that the Panacea is intelligent and adaptive in its response. It, quite bluntly, has to be in order to treat countless conditions so perfectly from a single dose. There is precisely zero chance that it isn't thinking to itself and making on-the-spot decisions regarding how to correct damage to a person. And even if it is intelligently deciding what is healing and what is damage, that's not inherently bad or problematic. That's just taking control away from evolution, which can be good or bad. The intents of the technology's inventor and the practical realisation of those intents determines which of the two it is. Evolution is an extremely crude method of advancing a species, painstakingly slow and only determined by the metrics of survival and reproduction, which are not necessarily what we want to be determining success by in an advanced civilisation. One could imagine the Panacea taking information from infectious pathogens and proactively incorporating countermeasures into the human genome, if that was what the creators desired - but that is speculation, in fairness. And while I guess the point you were trying to argue with the exaptation page is that interfering with traits that could become advantageous later might be problematic over time, that's not a problem exclusive to the "active decision making" Panacea, I'd argue it's even worse in the "reset to pre-set" Panacea because that would delete any prospect of that happening.
Mindflayer said:
2. Moreover, Nurgle's diseases are not really diseases, but some warp phenomenon that masks like them, being able to take lots of other forms. As someone had summarized:
The whole plotline of Cain trying to give panacea to an inquisitor under the pretext of declaring war on Nurgle is... odd.
And yet this very same quote addresses that plagues are still an attack vector. The more simple plagues are probably less dependent on warp power or don't need it entirely - it's passive income for Nurgle, and if you cut that off it's a huge problem even if other methods are available. Let's imagine you are a Nurgle cultist who has just seen the "truth". You could try some ritual craft to summon Nurgle's Rot and turn the world into a Plaguebearer factory, but if you don't know what you are doing, you might well just die and achieve nothing of significance. Or you could dump infected material into the water supply, or rub dirt into medical instruments, or dozens of other things that don't require you to engage with warpcraft. Maybe you could even go for non-pathogenic diseases like polluting the air or poisoning food with heavy metal waste. These non-warp diseases are practically necessary to start a "grassroots" Nurgle cult in the middle of nowhere. Once cults are established, sure, bring out the despair daemons and the memetic diseases and the tech-entropy, but you have to start somewhere. Khorne, Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh all have ways to gain emotional nutrition without lifting a finger, but if you get rid of diseases, Nurgle suddenly becomes comically disadvantaged in that struggle and essentially is forced to actively exert its power to get anything done.
Oh, and can I just be very clear - even stuff that is warp-powered can still be opposed by Panacea to a partial degree. The Adumbrian infected couldn't be cured, but the plague could be stopped in the early phase.
So I refute your suggestion that giving Panacea to declare war on Nurgle is odd or doesn't make sense. This won't end Nurgle alone, but it will dramatically weaken it if it becomes widespread, while also making humanity very resistant to its influence.
