What the Covid Pandemic Teaches Us about Evolution

The simple truth of evolution is this: if a living thing is not capable of surviving and reproducing, it will cease to exist, and if it is capable, it will thrive. This is the truth of how our world works and quite likely how the universe works as well. It is the truth of how each of us has come to be here and the truth of how our world has come to the place that it has in its history. The purpose of this short essay is to show how the Covid Pandemic is an excellent example of this process.
We are now dealing with the fifth variant of Covid. How did that happen? Did the Covid Board of Directors have a meeting at which they decided to bring on the heavier artillery since the other side was playing dirty with new anti-virus weapons? The simple answer is no. Covid did what viruses and other living things have done throughout time. It evolved.
How do living things evolve? The simple answer is this. They mutate, not by design but by our old friend, chance. Throughout history, living things have reproduced. If they have not, they have ceased to exist. When living things reproduce, the result is typically a combination of the genes of the parental lifeforms. But that is not all it is. Sometimes there are unexplained differences or oddities. These are called mutations, and it is the mutations that carry the potential seed of change. If the mutated lifeform is weaker than its parents, it will likely die out, but if it is better than its parents, it may well flourish and become the new future. This is how life evolves over time. The key to the speed of evolution is how long the life form takes to reproduce.
The evolution of humans is very slow. The human brain has changed very little in the last 10,000 years. Most humans still have wisdom teeth, remnants of a time when chewing raw food was common which was even longer ago. David Suzuki, one of Canada’s national treasures, earned his early reputation as a geneticist by studying fruit flies. When I first heard that, I thought “Yuck! Why study fruit flies?” But I was quite ignorant about the ways of evolution at that time. Now I understand why. Check out the following:
“An adult female fruit fly can lay up to 2,000 eggs on the surface of anything that's moist and rotting. Within 30 hours, tiny maggots hatch and start to eat the decayed food. Within 2 days, they're all grown up and ready to mate, too. While that transition may seem quick, a fruit fly only lives 8 to 15 days.”
One female can provide 2000 babies which can reproduce again within two days. That is potentially four million “grand-flylets” (I take responsibility for coining this word). In other words, a massive potential data base.
So, what is my point you may ask? My point is that some life forms take a long time to reproduce and thus a very long time to evolve. It might take several generations for some exceptional mutation with the potential to change the game plan to come along. But with fruit flies this process is condensed into hours and days. It becomes easier to study the process and to understand what is happening.
The covid virus also reproduces over a shorter period. If it reproduces more quickly, then it must mutate more quickly. If it mutates more quickly, it will likely create variants that are smarter/stronger than previous generations and are better able to overcome the medicinal opponents more quickly. Thus, it offers us the experience of seeing how evolution really works, much more quickly. Just to clarify, mutants are not created purposefully; they are created by chance.
I guess my main reason for writing this short piece is that the Corona virus shows us how evolution works. It is not a theory. It is a fact. Some preoccupied god is not responsible. This is an example, or proof if you will, of how it all has been happening since the first life forms occurred. They survive, they reproduce, and they mutate. If they are strong enough to reproduce, they can produce similar offspring. If they are not, they will disappear never to be heard of or from again. Their effect on the future will cease to exist. If by chance their offspring carry a mutation that gives them an advantage, then the parents might also disappear eventually, but the new generation will thrive.