Massive numbers of new COVID–19 infections, not vaccines, are the main driver of new coronavirus variants
- Written by Vaughn Cooper, Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Pittsburgh
The rise of coronavirus variants has highlighted the huge influence evolutionary biology has on daily life. But how mutations, random chance and natural selection produce variants is a complicated process, and there has been a lot of confusion about how and why new variants emerge.
Until recently, the most famous example of rapid evolution was the...