Unintelligent Design: “With Mimi, we’ve captured by chance a picture of an organism that was undergoing such a reduction, evolving toward fewer genes,” says Claverie. “This guy just retained more ancestral features than others.” Biologists, Claverie says, can no longer view viruses as random assemblages of genes. “We have to confer to these guys a nobility, a genealogy. Not only a genealogy. They are very ancestral, and their ancestors are at least contemporary with ours and those of all present-day life-forms. Mimi is like the missing link.”