Omicron and Evolution

 



The biggest problem with evolution is that, for the most part, we can't see it happening. That's why the idea was so hard to accept when Darwin first came up with it: like the idea that the earth is round, not flat -- or that it goes round the sun, not the reverse -- it doesn't seem to fit with 'common' sense. That's still why some people find it difficult to fully grasp: the idea that a creator god simply divided life up into different species is much easier to accept than trying to get your head around changes that happened at snail's pace over hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions of years. To a mortal being who can only hope to live 100 years at best, that sort of speculation can soon start to make your head hurt.

But things are different at smaller scales -- with insects, for example, where generations are measured in days, not decades. The reason why fruit flies have been so intensively studied by evolutionary scientists is that they have a life-span of only 40 days, and a reproductive cycle of about a week and a half. That's about 400 times faster than humans -- which means that any changes that happen as mutations naturally occur (or are artificially introduced) can be studied over short timescales that can be easily observed and measured by the scientists who are studying them. And at microscopic scales, the speed is even greater: in the right conditions, viruses can reproduce in a matter of hours. 

Which is why with the Covid pandemic, new variants emerge within months or even weeks. We know all about the apha variant, the delta variant and the omicron variant, but these are just the ones that are 'of concern' to the scientific community. There are many others -- among them gamma, epsilon, eta, iota, kappa, lamda and mu -- but these mutations have not proved dangerous. That's because the essence of evolution is that mutations are random, and only the ones that happen to be a better 'fit' with their environment spread through the population and survive. Which means that as new Covid variants emerge in real time, we are literally seeing evolution in action -- exactly what happened, but over millions of years, when the human 'variant' slowly mutated away from our ape ancestors and became the dominant strain.

So the question those who reject the 'theory' of evolution have to answer is this: if not evolution, how do you explain what is happening right before our very eyes? If everything that exists on earth were the creative act of a loving god, why would he spend his time devising ever more sneaky viral variants to outwit the immune system that he must have deliberately endowed us with -- us humans, created in his image. Is there any way that could possibly make sense? 

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