The Chaos and the Neutrality of Viral Evolution

The concept of evolution as being linear and progressive goes back beyond Darwin. It persisted into post-Darwinian evolutionary thinking in Victorian England. So for me, it's been less about this notion that viruses will always evolve towards being benign than is it heading towards increased complexity? You know, are human beings the pinnacle of a linear evolutionary process or do we have to go through all these other processes before getting there? And I think biology is not about that. Biology is about variation. And it's about change and it's about dynamic processes.