3 ms·
> To bacteria, individual humans are "too big to fail" in the same way geography is. ...which is why diseases rapidly evolve away from lethality?
by thaumasiotes 2y ago
> To bacteria, individual humans are "too big to fail" in the same way geography is.
...which is why diseases rapidly evolve away from lethality?
- Terr_ 2y agoThat sounds like an attempted "gotcha", but I think you missed the "matter of perspective." Imagine some strain of surviving bacterial-descendants are a marginally less-deadly than their predecessors after one solar year. What measure would you use for the comparison? If you were to pick "generations", that might be ~9000 for the bacteria, while applied to humans it's ~40x longer than all recorded history. Anywho, point is that for every "too big to fail" things there is usually a longer timescale where it stops looking that way.