As XEC, the latest COVID variant takes hold, we are watching viral evolution play out on a time scale short enough to follow, with different strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus independently acquiring similar or functionally similar mutations that improve its ability to infect us or to evade existing vaccines.
This is the same process that occurs over tens of thousands, even millions of years in living creatures, from slugs to dogs to you and me, producing the incredible diversity we see in the tree of life along with startling replays of the same idea, known formally as convergent evolution. This is simply when nature finds similar solutions to similar problems in evolutionarily distant groups — think about how dolphins and bats each evolved echolocation, despite being unrelated.
