4 ms·
Any time I read "kills 99% of germs" or "cuts by 77%" I think, nice, that's some strong selective pressure to help us evolve more resistant <insert things that
by xipho 5y ago
Any time I read "kills 99% of germs" or "cuts by 77%" I think, nice, that's some strong selective pressure to help us evolve more resistant <insert things that annoy Homo sapiens>. Particularly bad in agriculture where there pests have evolved resistance multiple times.
That said, eliminating Polio, etc. are examples of where things really worked out, so it can happen, YRMV.
- riffraff 5y agoAs someone said: every time you kill a spider you're selecting for faster, sneakier spiders.
- andrewflnr 5y agoThe wolbachia can evolve too. Even an arms race between them is probably better than status quo.
- onion2k 5y agoDoesn't it depend on what "99%" means? If a cleaning agent will kill 100% of 99% species of bacteria then there'll be nothing left except the bacteria that's already resistant to the agent and nothing will evolve new resistance. On the other hand, if it kills 99% of 100% of species of bacteria then you're right, the resistant ones will remain and could evolve in to a fully resistant species.
- pjerem 5y agoIt doesn’t matter because bacteria species are always fighting each other. So even if in your 99%, you kill 100% of a specific species, the 1% species left, whatever they are, have now plenty of free environment to proliferate. Yes it can be a good outcome if the resistant ones are not pathogens but the thing is that you don’t know and probabilities are that the pathogens / total won’t change.
- manwe150 5y agoI think you mean, “it does matter”, since you describe different outcomes. Even in the case where those were pathogens, they may subsequently lose the competitive pressure to be good at fighting. Then when they re-encounter a robust environment, they may be totally annihilated. In certain types of bio research, we now have to protect the species from humans, rather than the reverse, since they have been without that competitive pressure for so long and become optimized instead for growth and production.
- lostlogin 5y agoPolio is close to eliminated, but is still out there. There were shenanigans with the funding in the last year or two and that has not been helpful.