Week 5
Chicken or the egg, chicken or the egg, chicken or the egg?  To get to the other side of course!!
I cannot imagine this question to be anything other than some sort of zen koan, designed to exhaust the intellectual mind and put it in it's rightful place. I mean, my system starts to overload when I even start thinking about this. As a guy I used to work with often remarked in frustration, "Ugh, if I was only 30% smarter!", which is quite a bit.

How do new species emerge? I lean toward survival of the best adapted species. It seems that nature is willing to play the numbers game and hedge all bets, create a couple million of something and hopefully 2 will survive and reproduce, adapt and mutate. If that doesn't work, according Hindu mythology, just wait several cycles of several billions of years and start all over again. No hurry, no worry the cosmic play just continues on and on and on and on, stop! or maybe it doesn't.
Perhaps changes in the surrounding environment necessitate changes in a particular species or favor certain mutations that become adaptive traits to be passed on. In the case of a virus it might be necessary for survival for the species to jump species and even create some symbiotic relationship with the new host. Like some form of adaptive plasticity, that any organism can stretch it's pattern of forming to the outer limits but still stay within range.