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by lotsofpulp
2339 days ago
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> but doesn't evolution tend to pressure the virus developing different vectors, when faced with eradication? What does evolution “pressuring” mean? Either the organism (or virus) has sufficient chances to randomly mutate a a trait that enables it to survive, or it goes extinct. |
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Think of a population as holding at any given time a number of individuals carrying mutations. The fringe mutations, such as being able to be hosted by a different type of mosquito (say, better survivability in the host) don't provide much of a benefit to survival. But if the default host population goes away, those mutations become super valuable and will be selected.
See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/transgenic-mosqui... for a discussion on this topic.