If we were engineering this thing, then we would tinker and design in a workshop and test it out. But that doesn't happen with blind physics-evolution, phev. We are working with one in a million odds, which is beyond anything we can do with engineering, which works at one in ten thousand odds.
The brutality of phev is that each molecular change must result in an immediate benefit. No second chances. Schnooky comes out of the factory, and must succeed. Then the babies succeed, and soon, the population of billions has a schnooky variant.
Of course, lots of variants are already there, and it takes a big shift in environmental conditions to make one variant dominant. Success goes to those who can infect better, and reproduce faster. There are no prizes for being deadlier, and being too deadly too fast, means that you don't get much reproduction.
Look at that engineered marvel above. Every molecule must be important, it's like a compact car. But, once the virus has left the animals, it carries a lot of useless baggage. In the animals, these molecules were important for reproduction and infection. In humans, they present foreign proteins that the human body has never seen before. This is what kills people. If a fresh animal virus can solve the infection puzzle, then it is like covid.
- to be continued
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