I ain’t no biologist or anything, but I’m not sure viruses introduce mutations that would be passed along into offspring. Mutations occur at birth, and the way they go about becoming prominent is through natural selection.
You could possibly say that any horseshoe crabs that mutate at birth into not having their strong immune system would die off and not get any good chances to reproduce enough to evolve.
I ain’t no biologist or anything, but I’m not sure viruses introduce mutations that would be passed along into offspring. Mutations occur at birth, and the way they go about becoming prominent is through natural selection.
You could possibly say that any horseshoe crabs that mutate at birth into not having their strong immune system would die off and not get any good chances to reproduce enough to evolve.
Viruses have smuggled enough DNA into our DNA that 8% of the human genome is thought to derive from these events. Maybe that’s not the primary source of evolution, but it is a source of evolution.