RE: Epsilon, lambda, Orion, zeta, yellow squash, green tambourine, honeysuckle rose....... Anyone got a guess the number of variants we’re gonna be subjected to?
If the Coronavirus shares the same characteristics as the Flu viruses, you can expect ( like the Flu ) VARIANTS to appear all the time and we will soon run out of Greek letters to name them and have to resort to numbers instead.
The question is this — Does the Coronavirus grow more LETHAL as they mutate or do they become less lethal?
Believing that they will grow more LETHAL seems to go against the biological principle called Muller’s Ratchet, the hypothesis that in asexual reproduction, the irreversible accumulation of harmful mutations causes a species to die out gradually.
Muller’s ratchet predicts that when mutation rates are high and a significant proportion of mutations are deleterious, a kind of irreversible ratchet mechanism will gradually decrease the mean fitness of small populations of asexual organisms.
See here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7283725/
Yeah, you would think but the ‘royals’ are still around. :-)