Why Are Viral Capsids Icosahedral?

Ella Watkins-Dulaney for Asimov Press.By Ulkar AghayevaFrom the late 1980s through the early 2000s, a famous debate played out between the evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris on the nature of the evolutionary process.Gould viewed evolution as radically contingent: if “the tape of life” were to be rerun, he argued, even small environmental changes would result in widely divergent outcomes. The likelihood that any major biological innovation, such as multicellularity,...