Dunno how that's possible, given that mutations occur whenever there's a DNA replication error, something which, while rare, happens often enough that given the replication rate of viruses would be happening all the time.
There's no such thing as a "perfect" chemical process. Even in carefully controlled lab environments, the best you can hope for is something like a 12% failure rate. DNA replication in the body is dependent on numerous chemical processes.
Say every infected cell is producing 200 copies of the virus before it burns itself out and dies (probably an extremely conservative guess). That would mean, at most there would be 176 perfect copies and at least 24 imperfect copies. what you might call mutations. Most of these would likely be minor, hardly even worth noting.
But over time, as more and more of these mutations occur, especially as the virus jumps from one host to another, the tiny mutations would start to add up, creating new strains of the virus. Evolution being another word for natural selection, those strains of the virus less likely to kill the host and more easily transmissible would be more likely to infect new hosts, becoming dominant over time.
Dunno how that's possible, given that mutations occur whenever there's a DNA replication error, something which, while rare, happens often enough that given the replication rate of viruses would be happening all the time.
There's no such thing as a "perfect" chemical process. Even in carefully controlled lab environments, the best you can hope for is something like a 12% failure rate. DNA replication in the body is dependent on numerous chemical processes.
Say every infected cell is producing 200 copies of the virus before it burns itself out and dies (probably an extremely conservative guess). That would mean, at most there would be 176 perfect copies and at least 24 imperfect copies. what you might call mutations. Most of these would likely be minor, hardly even worth noting.
But over time, as more and more of these mutations occur, especially as the virus jumps from one host to another, the tiny mutations would start to add up, creating new strains of the virus. Evolution being another word for natural selection, those strains of the virus less likely to kill the host and more easily transmissible would be more likely to infect new hosts, becoming dominant over time.