Why did God design and create Viruses

MooseJam wrote: »

Does anyone know what the ratio of beneficial mutations to adverse mutations are, I assume adverse mutations lead to illness and birth defects

At the end of the day (sorry, been listening to Gift Grub) a mutation simply is what it is. Measuring a mutation in terms of beneficial or not depends on the environment that the organism finds itself in at the time of mutation.

How "beneficial" it is depends on the phenotype (the actual physical structures build from the blueprint that is your DNA) produced by the new genetic material, and the environment that the organism is in. A mutation that produces genetic material that produces one certain phenotype may be beneficial in one environment yet not in another. It may be beneficial in one way but detrimental in another (eg. standing up right leading to painful child birth).

The vast majority of mutations appear to do very little, but this is very difficult to measure since it is often hard to detect exactly what a gene does or what exactly a mutation to a gene has changed what it does.

You are carrying around on average 66 mutations from your parents DNA. What exactly those mutations have done depends on the individual case.

MooseJam wrote: »

Mutations are totally random and natural selection has risen to us evolving, but being totally random there must be more adverse mutations than positive ones and there is a huge line of sickness and still births going back through the ages right ?

Certainly, but the point is that being adverse or positive is not a property of the mutation itself. It is a consequence that only comes about in the context of the environment the mutated organism finds itself in. A mutation might be positive to one person and the exact same mutation might be adverse to another person, depending on where you are living or even the other genes in your DNA. Or a mutation might be adverse to you, but that altered gene might be beneficial to your great great great grand child. Or vice versa.

One way of looking at it is that the number of mutations that lead to an beneficial adaptation of a species to its current environment is a tiny percentage of the over all number of mutations that take place.

This is something I don't think people who misunderstand evolution realize. They thing a mutation will either produce a new leg or kill you. In fact mutations are happening all the time in every new baby born, in ever species. Every single human on Earth has mutated from his/her parents DNA.

MooseJam wrote: »

Here we are this wonder of evolution but it can't have been as easy as evolution makes it appear to be

Well everything gets easy when you put it on a long enough time line

Again this is something people seem to forget, that evolution has taken 3.5 billion years to get to this point. Most people have little concept of what that amount of time actually is, as we think in decades and centuries.

MooseJam wrote: »

we just can't see all the failures because they are all dead, only the successfull are here now.

Exactly. You only see the end product of evolution, not the trillions of organisms that ended up going now where.

Again, as I said in my previous post, one way of actually seeing this is with computer models, models that can record the virtual organisms that are replaced by more adapted evolved versions.