As news reports begin to express concern about mutations in #nCoV_2019 I wrote a piece with the great @XuetingQ to help the public make sense of mutations and evolution - including what sequence can tell us, and what it can'thttps://ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu/mutation-adaptation-and-virus-genomes-a-primer-for-the-public/ …
This is great. One thing I'm not entirely agreeing on - "Viruses evolve to transmit". The picture is quite a bit more complex than that - primarily viruses evolve to survive in a single host, which may or may not affect transmission.
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yeah there was some discussion about that exact sentence. I guess we could add "in something, not necessarily a human, and behavior can be different in non-natural hosts". But I still think the point that selection is for transmission (subject to tradeoffs etc) is important
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Well, if we want to nitpick, probably shouldn’t say viruses evolve “to do” anything, right? Implies a will or direction. Sounds overly adaptationist. Viruses just evolve. There is selection for survival within hosts or transmission between them. Admittedly a subtle point.
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Except for arboviruses.
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Always with the arboviruses!
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I would argue viruses don't have a purpose while evolving, they just do.
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Excellent piece. I too have concerns with “viruses evolve to transmit” but “In Darwinian evolution, the basic mechanism is genetic mutation, followed by selection of the organisms most likely to survive.” — Pamela Weintraub https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evolutionary … 1/
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Virus progeny may, or may, not have mutations. I realize this is anthropomorphic but a virion (virus) is agnostic whether a mutation or gene shuffling increases its rate of replication, 2/
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