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Study shows how swiftly infectious viruses evolve

Now, why would anyone cultivate bird flu viruses in a lab to be easily transmitted among humans?
Idiocy? Stupidity? Brain deficiency? Americanity?
Or all of the above?
What kind of morality, if any, do these people have?

like the man said... the odd of this happening by coincidence (darwinistic evolution) is virtually zero. either that or viruses have a mechanism for hyper-mutation-rate in cases of non-infection.... now how the heck would something like that work... and to think those white-cloaked psychopaths are still working on biological weapons...

A very, very fascinating study.

It certainly seems like there is something more than just random Darwinian natural selection going on here. How could precisely the same series of 4 mutations, leading to precisely the same evolutionary target configuration, occur just by chance in 24 out of the 96 cell lines?

It almost seems as if the evolutionary target configuration that the virus arrived at was somehow known in advance to be the optimum solution, and that the 4 steps to get to that target configuration were taken out AFTER this target configuration had been decided in advance.

The idea that some guiding and calculating intelligence may play a role in evolution is known as intelligent design (ID). Intelligent design may be based on some quantum effects that allows evolution to be more than just a random trial and error mechanism as described by Darwinian natural selection. Intelligent design theory posits that these optimum configurations of evolution are pre-calculated in some way.

Could the very intriguing results of this study offer some evidence that evolution takes places using Intelligent design, as opposed to (or in addition to) Darwinian natural selection?

There is some tiny bit of intelligence in a virus, it reacts to changes as virus and other forms of life have done for millions of years. No need to bring in a supernatural agent to explain this. Intelligent design is just another form of creationism. You should get the Nova espisode "Intelligent Design on Trial" to see how a court case progressed.

Quote: "Intelligent design is just another form of creationism".

Well yes, but intelligent design, if it does take place, might be studied by scientific methods.

If you look at quantum computing (which is on the way to becoming technologically feasible), the main advantage quantum computation offers is that it can perform non-polynonlynomial calculations within polynomial time.

Design optimization problems (like finding the perfect surface shape for an aircraft wing, for example) often involve non-polynonlynomial calculations, which are so computation intensive that regular computers cannot handle them once the problem size gets above a certain point. However, quantum computers find no difficulty at all in processing non-polynonlynomial calculations of any size.

Working out the optimum shape and design of a protein is probably going to be a non-polynonlynomial calculation. If evolutionary processes had access to some natural form of quantum computation, and used this to pre-plan and design evolutionary changes to protein shape, then it could certainly said that there is intelligent design behind evolutionary processes.

So if we could prove that some computational processes are indeed pre-planning evolutionary changes, it would be reasonable to call this intelligent design.

Whether you want to call this intelligent design a "supernatural agent" is more a matter of taste and disposition: believers will say this is the work of God; atheists will say that it is merely a well-undertsood quantum effect.

In any case, it remains to be proven whether such intelligent design pre-planning processes take place or not in evolution.

First you say that quantum computing is on its way to being technically feasable and then you state that quantum computers find no difficulty at in processing non-polynonlynomial calculations of any size. Until a practical quantum computer has been built and ready for commercial sales then any speculation on its capabilities is vaporware.

"Non-polynonlynomial" was an error; I meant to write "non-polynomial".

What has commercialization got to do with this? Non-polynomial versus polynomial calculations are abstract mathematical concepts, and exist entirely independently of whether you make money from them.

Small-scale quantum computers that have only a few qubits have been built and they do work.

There is a theory that there is a negotiation between species, the extremes are parasites and beneficial life forms. There are parasitic lifeforms that start as a disease with a high fatality and eventually "learn" to not kill the host before finding another host and eventually becoming a minor ailment or even adapt to the host in a way that is beneficial to the host and the parasite.

We have E. Coli in our intestines, a beneficial group that helps digest food for us. There are other E.Coli that contaminate food in outbreaks of food poisoning.

The best example of biological negotiation are flowering plants and pollinators that co-evolve together. Bees thrive through gathering nectar from flowers, plants thrive because the bees pollinate the plants.