Responding to Darwinist PZ Myers about natural selection and the coronavirus:
In terms of our present viral pandemic, what Myers and other Darwinists claim is that all life’s diversity arose by the same mechanism that this pandemic arose — chance mutation and undirected reproductive wildfire. In other words, to Myers, evolution is pandemics, all the way down. Randomness and survival of survivors explains all.
Yet a careful look at the coronavirus shows why viral evolution is not an example of evolution of new species nor an example of how life’s complexity evolves. It is doubtful that a virus is even a living thing. The coronavirus is essentially a non-living parasite. It depends wholly on the biological mechanisms of immeasurably more complex living organisms — us and bats — to persist and replicate. Without humans (or bats), coronavirus disintegrates in hours or days.
Whatever its exact (as yet unknown) lethality, the coronavirus doesn’t succeed when it kills. A virus that kills its individual host has failed, because the virus disappears if its host dies. Viruses need living hosts for their very existence. The coronavirus does kill some hosts, but since hosts usually survive it is on the whole “successful.” And if a virus isn’t alive, then viral mutation and differential reproduction is not an example of the evolution of life anyway. The coronavirus’s evolution — the pandemic — depends on the living specified complexity of humans and bats. Intelligent design in nature is the prerequisite for all natural selection — nature without teleology would be chaos, and no evolution at all.
Michael Egnor, “Evolution Presupposes Intelligent Design: Case of the Coronavirus” at Evolution News and Science Today
Now that he mentions it, Darwinism—without design in nature— probably couldn’t even produce viable viruses.