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> I don't believe there's any molecular mechanism why does it have to be molecular and not just evolutionary? That's what a virus does for a living after all.
by mro_name 5y ago
> I don't believe there's any molecular mechanism
why does it have to be molecular and not just evolutionary? That's what a virus does for a living after all.
- azangru 5y agoI would say it's molecular biology that investigates what the virus actually does; while evolutionary biology is an attempt of explaining, mostly retrospectively, how an organism has changed over time, and possibly what has driven this change. My understanding is that evolutionary biology is kinda like statistics in the sense that it can tell you the distribution of the outcomes of tossing a coin, but it can't tell you whether the next flip of the coin will be the heads or the tails. And what we are usually most concerned about practically is not how the virus will behave over a long period of time, but what the outcome of the next flip will be.
- mro_name 5y agoah, I see. If you mean looking at the molecule's behaviour rather than the at molecule itself, we agree. I didn't mean evolutionary biology but the evolution of the virus, it's adaption to the host and change over time.