Homocon

From: Research papers under-report evolution

"With rare exceptions, papers in biomedical journals actually got evolutionary concepts right; they simply refused to refer to them by name. It was so pronounced that the paper's title used "the E-word" to refer to evolution."

Are we less concerned than we should be about the evolution of viruses because the information isn't being communicated properly, or is it really about public misconceptions regarding the theory of evolution itself? As one commenter to the article states: "In this context, does the language of evolution include natural selection? In my experience, the general public doesn't really consider something like a strain of microbes becoming drug resistant to be an example of evolution. If you tell most people a microbe has evolved, they'll think it's changed into a fish or a snail or something like that."

Perhaps this is the problem -- that "evolution" now means, in our collective consciousness, a transformation into something else entirely, rather than the process of adaptation (or Natural Selection) which the term, as applied to species development, originally appeared to convey. While an author begs to differ here, it seems quite clear to me that trans-species mutation is merely a more extreme version of adaptation, like adaptation on steroids.

And viruses, with their ability to both progress and mutate, would most certainly qualify as prime examples of evolutionary adaptation at work. Though they remain, in the end, still viruses . . . or do they become us?