Coronavirus 'acts like no pathogen humanity has ever seen,' say doctors

Leveraging from this to make a point (and not trying to pick on you, sorry) but layfolk generally think about evolution incorrectly, leading to a sense of surprise about something like this. Evolution doesn’t have goals or destinations. People always talk about the “reasons” certain body features were created and such. That’s really a form of anthropomorphism of what is a passive emergent property of a complex system. It’s hard to wrap your head around, but evolution doesn’t “do”, evolution just “is”. The presumption of agency in things is so automatic for us that we constantly assign goals and strategies to evolution without realizing it, just in the way we discuss it.

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