Never say the pandemic hasn't been educational, as COVID-19 has certainly given all of us a crash course in evolution. Charles Darwin's notion of the survival of the fittest, one of the tenets of his theory of evolution, epitomizes the manner in which subsequent mutations of the virus that are better-suited to spread have outcompeted each other — typically eradicating earlier, less-fit virus variants in the process. Indeed, from the primordial alpha variant to the delta variant to omicron, new variants emerge when unique mutations make a strain either more contagious, or more capable of evading immunity from previous infections and vaccines.
RNA viruses like SARS-CoV-2 are always mutating; every replication in a hosts' cells creates a moment for a chance mutation to emerge. While viruses are technically not alive, it is their nature to mutate and evolve as they infect hosts' cells and replicate. Indeed, this is how they survive.
