3 ms·
The difference between us and gorillas is best understood as the number of genes, not the % of nucleotides. Virus genomes are much, much smaller. Since viruses
by spfzero 5y ago
The difference between us and gorillas is best understood as the number of genes, not the % of nucleotides. Virus genomes are much, much smaller.
Since viruses can multiply so quickly, when grown in large numbers of lab mice they can mutate relatively quickly into something with a "desirable" trait.
In fact if as you say the virus has passed through millions of wild hosts on its way to being perfectly adapted to infecting human lungs, why has no one found even one of those millions of hosts?
- lamontcg 5y agoThey're still several decades of evolution away, given how fast viruses mutate in the wild. > We confirm that a direct proximal ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 is yet to be sampled, since the closest relative shared a common ancestor with SARS-CoV-2 approximately 40 years ago https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3 And do you have any idea how many animals there are in China? There's 1.4 billion people to start with. There's 100 to 100,000 more vertebrates than people in the world. Take even 50,000 samples and you're still barely scraping the surface.