Nice intro to this!

Sadly, it’s clear that viruses always win the arms race.

True for bacteria as well. There, it’s a matter of relative rates of reproduction (typical generation time is about 20 minutes — compared to 20 years for humans) They can evolve faster than we can. If anything, viruses can evolve faster than bacteria (and if you get to the way influenza viruses can swap sections of RNA, it’s pretty scary).

I’m of the opinion that this evolutionary differential is why larger (and so more slowly reproducing) organisms invented sex (in the sense of different reproductive roles for male and female). I’d offer the Irish potato famine as an example of what happens when there is a large number of genetically-identical organisms (potatoes did not come from seed, but from eyes cut out of already-existing potatoes — so they were all essentially clones). That particular potato strain (the ‘lumper’) pretty much disappeared. (yes, it’s recently been re-discovered, but I’m trying not to digress too far).

And, I’d agree that antigenic systems also come from this. It’s a hack, but a fairly awe-inspiring hack produced through selection pressure and individual variation s— which come from sexual reproduction.