Mutations trend towards stable states. Stable states further trend towards states where fast mutation becomes disabled because it's in a "good" stable zone.
Symbiosis is the ultimate stable state.
You can get stable states in intermediate zones like hiv infections, but these zones are not as good as symbiosis. They have potential to kill off a weak population, additionally humans are actively combatting the virus. In symbiosis there's no negative for either side.
There is no evolutionary pressure to "mutate" in symbiosis. Mutations will occur in the beginning. Those will die off fast and eventually the strain will become more and more stable as the gene starts mutating towards a configuration that has slow mutations.
As I understand it you left off the key reason why symbiosis is a stable state for a parasite/symbiote: because other states tend to destroy the host, causing the mutated strain to (usually) have a harder time propagating. That's all well and good when you're looking at evolutionary theory writ large, it's less appealing when you're talking about sticking a new bacteria in a specific person's mouth.
No untrue. That is the most extreme case. A parasite can make a host less healthy and less likely to reproduce. This all lives on a gradient where parasitic relationship move the likelihood of reproduction down a little while symbiosis is the most extreme state where reproductive success is only positively effected.
>it's less appealing when you're talking about sticking a new bacteria in a specific person's mouth.
What does appeal have to do with anything? Much of our medical treatments were unappealing at one point in time. Colonoscopy? Sticking a camera up your ass to prevent cancer. Surgery? Cutting you open to fix something. None of it appealing but all of it necessary and worth it in the end.
Also keep in mind we live in times where much of the food we eat is bioengineered to live in symbiosis with us. The difference is instead of directly manipulating the gene, we indirectly manipulate it through artificial offspring selection. All domesticated animals and plants have been manipulated this way at a macro level for eons. The difference here is that the manipulation is happening on the molecular level rather then the macro level.
Your aversion to it is just instinctive and habitual but it's no different to much of the things we already do.
> A parasite can make a host less healthy and less likely to reproduce. This all lives on a gradient where parasitic relationship move the likelihood of reproduction down a little while symbiosis is the most extreme state where reproductive success is only positively effected.
Whether or not the host is destroyed, that symbiosis is the end game is not reassuring to someone whose mouth has gotten worse as a result of the treatment.
I'm not saying it won't work and isn't worth a large scale trial, I'm just saying your arguments based on evolutionary theory aren't a sound basis for medicine. I would not take a tapeworm into me on the grounds that someday tapeworms might evolve into a symbiotic relationship with humans.
>Whether or not the host is destroyed, that symbiosis is the end game is not reassuring to someone whose mouth has gotten worse as a result of the treatment.
That is the point of clinical trials. No treatment can be released until it has been verified to be safe.
>I'm not saying it won't work and isn't worth a large scale trial, I'm just saying your arguments based on evolutionary theory aren't a sound basis for medicine.
I never said it was a sound basis in it's current form. It's a sound basis to move forward rahttps://news.ycombinator.com/newspidly to change the current theory into a sound basis.
> I would not take a tapeworm into me on the grounds that someday tapeworms might evolve into a symbiotic relationship with humans.
one average guy who literally did the opposite of you. Against all medical advice, he infected himself with hookworms:
The innovative risk takers are the ones that try things out and move things forward. I'm not recommending you become one, but I recommend you support people who have the drive and willingness to do this because you and I only stand to benefit.
The other problem with science is that it's slow. Will science produce a verified treatment in your lifetime? Clinical trials cost millions. Maybe they'll do one, maybe not. In those cases if you have no other option, take a risk.
But here, we move this organism to a state of which we don’t know whether it’s stable. If it isn’t, it may take a while to get back to a stable state and, in-between, it could be nasty.
Also, I would think the Spanish flu, the Hongkong flu, COVID-19, etc. are examples of cases where “trending towards stable states” had fairly dire consequences.
>But here, we move this organism to a state of which we don’t know whether it’s stable.
We have to test the stability in experiments. Logically though we can assume it's stable as all the macro evolutionary pressures make sense here. When a virus kills, it's almost always a fluke one off mutation.
>Also, I would think the Spanish flu, the Hongkong flu, COVID-19, etc. are examples of cases where “trending towards stable states” had fairly dire consequences.
Yes they are trending towards stable states. But these are huge anomalies of conditions involving death. Likely instable states of mouth bacteria basically involve the newly introduced bacteria dying off or having new side effects. Again this has to be measured. I think it can be easily done with primates getting fed human diets.
I think you're just reacting to the fear mongering headlines of killer virus. What's going on here isn't living at those extremities and is ultimately a different topic. Cavities in our mouths are also stable states, the goal is to push it out of this zone into the ultimate stable state of symbiosis.
Symbiosis is the ultimate stable state.
You can get stable states in intermediate zones like hiv infections, but these zones are not as good as symbiosis. They have potential to kill off a weak population, additionally humans are actively combatting the virus. In symbiosis there's no negative for either side.
There is no evolutionary pressure to "mutate" in symbiosis. Mutations will occur in the beginning. Those will die off fast and eventually the strain will become more and more stable as the gene starts mutating towards a configuration that has slow mutations.