Some experts suggest Omicron variant may have evolved in an animal host

Re:Some experts suggest Omicron variant may have evolved in ... by tzs on Thursday December 02, 2021 @03:16PM (#29421868)

If you were trying to make it click by citing the micro evolution you were working with it is not all that surprising it didn't work, because in fact trying to use micro evolution to prove that macro evolution is possible is not a very good approach.

In programming terms, evolution is like tweaking a program a few lines at a time, with the requirement that the program has to still run and be useful after each tweak. You can evolve a C program this way to get a faster, or smaller, or more memory efficient, or more featured C program, but you are not going to be able to evolve a C program into an APL or Haskel or LISP program that way.

That macro evolution is possible is quite amazing and astounding when you stop and really think about the constraints. It is not at all obvious that micro evolution implies the possibility of macro evolution.

It's really something that is best approached from the opposite direction. We see evidence of macro evolution, and then use micro evolution as part of the explanation of how this is happening.

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Re:Some experts suggest Omicron variant may have evolved in ... by mikeyouse on Thursday December 02, 2021 @03:46PM (#29422286)

Dude literally thought the world was 6,000 years old and that Adam lived to be 930 likely because "the oxygen content of the air was higher then" -- I wasn't too hung up on walking through the science of evolution with him. He also told me evolution wasn't possible because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, so.. yeah.

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