Twenty-one Chinese scientists and a British scholar working in China jointly published an article on the 16th, using classical evolutionary theory, to strongly demonstrate why the new coronavirus can only be derived from nature, not man-made.
This opinion article entitled "On the origin of SARS-CoV-2-Blind watchmaker's argument" was published in the academic journal "Science in China: Life Sciences" that day. The journal is co-sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
According to Wu Zhongyi, the first author and corresponding author of the paper and a professor at the School of Life Sciences at Sun Yat-sen University, there is a widely accepted view in the theory of evolution: species evolution has no special purpose. If nature is compared to a watchmaker, it can only be A blind watchmaker. A species that perfectly adapts to the environment will not be created all at once. It needs to accumulate small but adaptable changes step by step over a long period of time and a large number of random mutations.
"As a'perfect' virus, the new coronavirus must be a product of natural evolution. Because even the top human scientists cannot'make' a virus that perfectly adapts to the population." Wu Zhongyi said, this is like the most technological And experienced mobile phone manufacturers, it is impossible to design a world's most popular mobile phone at one time-the most "perfect" product must be born out of market inspection and repeated polishing.
Part of the existing research work also proves this from the side: mice cannot be infected with the new coronavirus, but scientists have used artificial selection methods to find new coronavirus strains that can infect mice; even so, these artificially screened strains cannot Caused such a large-scale epidemic in the mouse population.
"We infer that before the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, related viruses have experienced repeated mutual infections in wild animals and people, and gradually accumulated mutations adapted to the human body in the process. In the process of invading people, the virus has repeatedly failed. Repeatedly fighting and leaving "trace" until it evolved into today's state that is extremely adaptable to crowd transmission." Wu Zhongyi said.
Previously, Wu Zhongyi’s team had proposed a progressive evolution model for the new coronavirus. It believed that the place of origin (PL0) of the virus should be sparsely human and the habitat of the animal host, where the virus can compete with its animal host. Subsequently, the virus accidentally spread to people without herd immunity, and the latter became the first outbreak site.